There appears to be a remarkably tight information bottleneck when communication unfamiliar information outwards into the world (~10 Bits/Sec). Paul Fitt's experiments reveal this for manual movements of varying precision   more »

“Suppose it’s all wrong and we have no bottleneck”, What would be the consequences?   more »

So an interesting question is whether the bottleneck speed has varied with human evolution.   more »

FRCs – 10 – Challenging my suggestion that the Black Box of the mind is “nearly empty at birth”   more »

Let's avoid the use of the word consciousness on this blog   more »

Does the bottleneck relate to the experience of Time Standing Still when we have an accident?   more »

Hi Richard,

Given that we have a very low idling bit-rate and also forget things at a certain rate (or rather we seem unable to access at will, associations of many things that stimulate the re-creation of a pattern of connection leading to the activation of a memory) is it conceivable that the overall bit-rate summed at the interface could be negative ? or maybe negative at times ? For example the day after a memory test, how many of the memory wizards can repeat the sequence they just remembered ? Similarly students who cram for an exam rapidly forget what they have learned after an exam. Maybe i'm mixing up stored data or more accurately potential data with data rates but there must be a rate for memory loss. (This is a different argument to the huge loss at any one time of data that is dumped internally that leads to our latency of awareness)

I suppose as one gets older the rate fluctuates with deeper negative excursions than positive ones compared with our youth. Also what do you reckon is our 'idling' bit-rate when we are, say day-dreaming, rather than actively trying to remember something.

I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing because I don't think these arguments are acounting for the vast network of connectivity in the brain and the rich inner experience of awareness, irrespective of how much that is an illusion of what lies beyond the interface. The other contribution to a net negative rate is of course cell death which occurs all the time. If we lose 10% of our brain cells that still leaves ~ 10^ 10 cells and more importantly given that one cell can be wired to up to 10,000 others the connectivity is an impossibly large number ( eg for n neurons the net sum of different patterns of connection taking two at a time, three at a time etc = 2^(n(n-1)/2) - 1 ie only 7 brain cells leads to over 2 million possible patterns of connection (assuming complete plasticity of all cells ie connectable to all others)

Cheers,

Rioja

Added data points for short duration records by Ramón Campayo (1/2 sec to 4 seconds)   more »

Ben Pridmore, World Memory Champion describes how he groups cards and digits in chunks, to maximise his speed   more »

Adders are faster than Rememberers and Multipliers   more »

The most effective memory technique used by the world record holders, is based on a narrative around a journey   more »

Are the memory tests using digits or playing cards untypical of human learning tasks?   more »

Corrected bit/symbol error for playing cards now brings points on memory graph for cards and decimal digits closer together   more »

Black Box model - Judge by measured performance, not by what someone tells you! + PC Analogy   more »

The Extra Terrestrials want to know if we are capable of learning from them   more »

the interface sits somewhere between the hard-wired neural processing behind the eyes, ears, and other sensors, and the inner processing related to consciousness   more »

The only thing that the brain needs to do quickly, is to work out whether to flinch away   more »

"Surely we're designed for looking at certain patterns of information"   more »

Your tests make an assumption about being limited by a communications bottleneck, rather than memory speed.   more »

"How do we know the 4-letter words that we initially failed to remember are not acquired or transferred to the brain cells?"   more »

"The memory test examples are untypical for humans. Surely we are much faster at other tasks?"   more »

"Doesn’t our intelligence increase the amount of information we can take in through our senses?"   more »

"The human mind has massive parallelism; doesn’t that mean that we take in so much more?"   more »

"When I perceive a scene or an object, don’t I take in a huge amount of information?"   more »

There is little evidence that our human mind can absorb more than a few bits per second of truly novel information. This is shockingly small. Where is the evidence to the contrary?   more »