HACKER Q&A
📣 amts

How many developers think they detect 11 mln bits of info per second?


As Steven Kotler mentioned in a "Flow Research Collective" newsletter, from which I've unsubscribed after reading that "Our senses gather 11 million bits of information every second", becasue such conclusion seems fundamentally flawed. Elswhere he mentioned that this information was mentioned in the book "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders, which I haven't read. So I am curious how many actual developers really think that they gather 11 million bits of information every second, or at least if they really could calculate how many bits of information they handle every second during a programming session (and what quality of programming is produced during then).

  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
I’m not sure I fully understand your question, but I think you’re incorrectly assuming that we can use the full input bandwidth for whatever we want to use it for, while, in reality, most of it is unconscious, and independent of our attention (whatever that is. AFAIK, there still are arguments over how to define that, and on whether you can attend to two things at the same time). You can’t, for example, close your ears and use its information processing capacity for doing programming.

https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...:

“Many researchers (being human) expected that the human brain would show a tremendous information processing capability. Interestingly enough, when researchers sought to measure information processing capabilities during “intelligent” or “conscious” activities, such as reading or piano playing, they came up with a maximum capability of less than 50 bits per second. For example, a typical reading rate of 300 words per minute works out to about 5 words per second. Assuming an average of 5 characters per word and roughly 2 bits per character yields the aforementioned rate of 50 bits per second. Clearly, the exact number depends on various assumptions and could vary depending on the individual and the task being performed. It is known, however, that the senses gather some 11 million bits per second from the environment.”

I couldn’t find where that “it is known, however” comes from.

I’m sure there’s a lot of uncertainty in those numbers, but this claims the unconscious brain processes many orders of magnitude more information than the conscious part.

They also have a split over the senses that shows how vision dominates our information processing capacity:

    sensory system bits per second
    eyes                 10,000,000
    skin                  1,000,000
    ears                    100,000
    smell                   100,000
    taste                     1,000
👤 dexwiz
Video alone from your eyes could be that much. However our senses are most definitely analog, so measuring bits is a bit disingenuous.