Perhaps you meant we only commit a few hundred bits of information to long term memory per second under uninteresting conditions?
*Sorry for piling on! I didn't see the other two replies and went to get coffee before finishing my reply.
In another reply I quoted research that shows that only ~10 kbits/sec make it even into layer 4 of v1 from the optic nerve.
If you have anything talking about spinal processing I'd love to read it.
I think the main confusion here was over the definition of 'absorb'. Your version is much narrower than I'd use. The sensory molecular pathways and accompanying structure of nerves themselves produce significant processing right at the outset which your definition would entirely discount. There is no reason to discount what would otherwise become 'pre-processing' in your model.
"the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max"
ABCLAW:
"Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair."
Does that information actually make it to the brain? I thought sending a signal to the brain to process it there and then send back balancing signals would take too much time to keep you on your feet (at around 100m/s, a nerve signal would take about 1/50 of a second to move from legs to brain and back)
There also is evidence that your spine can do quite a bit of the muscle control needed for balancing on its own. See knee reflex and spinal cat (completely cut the spinal cord of a cat in the neck; notice that cat is paralyzed. Hang cat in harness, with feet on a treadmill. Turn on treadmill; cat walks (possibly only after some training; I don't know the details). Known since the 1950's. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/ (paywalled)).
Somebody should tell the lossy video compression folks.
> Because of a limited number of axons in the optic nerves (approximately 1 million axons in each) only ~6x10^6 bits/sec leave the retina and only 10^4 make it to layer IV of V1 [22,23]. These data clearly leave the impression that visual cortex receives an impoverished representation of the world, a subject of more than passing interest to those interested in the processing of visual information [24]. Parenthetically, it should be noted that estimates of the bandwidth of conscious awareness itself (i.e. what we ‘see’) are in the range of 100 bits/sec or less [22,23]
Estimates of quantified human sensory system throughput. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Estimates_of_quantified_hu... [accessed Jun 20, 2017].
Not all information processed is stored.
If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.
To test this, try seeing if you can distinguish HD from SD without the use of your fovea. You have one highly detailed section of your eye, and the rest is low quality input which is "upgraded" through previous sightings with the fovea and your brains knowledge of how it thinks the world works.
See 'foveated rendering' which will be important in the VR world, to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
oh_sigh is being downvoted for truth.
At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption).
At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double the college-educated adult average), a human can absorb a maximum of less than 7 MB/day.
We can estimate the size of a symbol though: 13b for primary tones(20khz range at about 3Hz resolution) + 4b for rising/falling/etc tonal patterns + 7b for volume (1dB detection over 120db range) + (42 phonemes in english so round up to 256 for convenience) 8b for phoneme patterns + 2 ears preprocessed for 2d directions is maybe 4b direction and 4b distance gives a total of around 40b per symbol.
So with that wild approximation, it's at 800 bps, or 8.64 MB / 24h
(My first posts on seeing this concept, elsewhere, had confused bits and bytes, so I ended up with 1.7 MB rather than 0.2 MB.)
But the point remains that that what we're discussing is almost certainly a maximum upper bound on human conscious information processing capacity. And that the values are ... pretty limited, relative to the amounts of information our machines can fling at us.
8.6 MB/day means that on average we're looking at 2/3 of that for waking hours or 5.7 MB. If you spend half your waking hours at work, that's about 2.9 MB of information acquired per day at work, max, over audio track.
And that's the tail-end of a 3.5 billion year R&D effort.
We're talking bits/second (bandwidth) here, not simply bits. So given that...
The human visual pathway has a bandwidth of about 10 megabits per second, so we build the current "view" somewhere in our brain and constantly update it with the stream of data from the visual pathways (there are several). So we're always scanning visually, always updating our view with new info.