Is this really true? I would've imagined it to be hearing, though tbh I'm unsure how one would begin to approach measuring them in isolation.
The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and 75-150 million rods (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina). There's a bit of crazy data compression that goes in to this, but the amount of information to process from the eyes is several orders of magnitude greater than from the years.
> The adult human eye has around 70 million cones and 75-150 million rods (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina). There's a bit of crazy data compression that goes in to this, but the amount of information to process from the eyes is several orders of magnitude greater than from the years.
While you're technically correct, that's not the whole story.
There is a substantial amount of image processing that happens in the eye (I suppose it's possible that's true of the ear as well; we know much less about hearing than sight). I'm not familiar with all the research in the area, so I can't throw out numbers, but you can't just compare numbers of raw sensors meaningfully.
However, the statement was:
> There is more brain input from vision than any other input possible
I guess we could compare the nerves that lead from the sense organs. Again from wikipedia:
> Each human optic nerve contains between 770,000 and 1.7 million nerve fibers
> In humans, there are on average 30,000 nerve fibers within the cochlear nerve
so again, at least an order of magnitude more nerve connections from the sense organs to the brain. I think this backs up the original statement.
Interestingly the number of nerve connections from the cochlear are greater than the number of raw sensory inputs, but the eye is quite the opposite. I know the input to the brain is more of a differential coding between colours than raw data from the cells.
Why not? It's certainly not definitive, but assuming a correlation between number of sensors and dataflow is certainly a reasonable starting point. If you really want to suggest the number of raw sensors is meaningless with regard to data volume, that seems like a much bolder claim. Especially when, as here, it's a 4-5 order of magnitude difference.
Just from a signal processing perspective, sound is a 1D data type, though we do have stereo sound and can localize sounds, so that's some additional processing there I suppose. There's also frequencies involved. Image processing is typically more demanding than audio from what I understand with computational things, images being 2D, or 3D sources. This is a pretty interesting exploration relative sensory input load.
Mental breaks from reality are increasingly common as society increasingly condones and encourages escaping reality in many ways, including recreational drug use, television and video game addictions, and even physical mutilation.
Yet this isn't happening with those who were born with one less way to perceive reality. Perhaps it's because those born blind have a greater and stronger need to hold fast to reality, themselves not being able to benefit from it nearly as much as everyone around them and as much as nature would have it.
Schizophrenia rates have declined significantly over the past century, and have been stable over the past 20 years. If anything, the data better supports the opposite story - that as societies develop more sophisticated ways of altering conscious experience, people are less likely to be schizophrenic.
But more soberly, I'd say there's probably no link at all, and that both narratives just reflect a misunderstanding of the pathology of schizophrenia.
https://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/scz/sb-time.html https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-trends-in-GP-record...