concept

The conscious bottleneck

The startling gap between how much sensory data floods the nervous system and how much actually reaches conscious awareness. The senses pump in around 11 million bits per second - the eyes account for most of it - yet the stream that reaches conscious awareness, the self that thinks and decides, is estimated at a mere 10 to 50 bits per second, slower than a 1980s modem. The brain ruthlessly compresses a firehose of sensation down to a thin abstract trickle of meaning. Tor Nørretranders called the result "the user illusion".