Processing Capacity of the Conscious Mind
08/18/2019
“The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time. While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.”
Excerpt From
The Organized Mind
Daniel J. Levitin
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-organized-mind/id731072740?mt=11
“120 bits per second This estimate derives independently from Csikszentmihalyi (2007) and the Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky, who made an independent estimate that regardless of the modality, the cortex cannot take in more than 50 bits/second—within an order of magnitude of Csikszentmihalyi’s. Csikszentmihalyi explains his estimate: “As George Miller and others have suggested, we can process 5–7 bits of information in one apperception; each apperception takes at least 1/15th of a second; hence 7 × 15=105 bits/second. Nusbaum has calculated that understanding verbal material takes on the average 60 bits/second.”
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Nakamura, J. (2010). Effortless attention in everyday life: A systematic phenomenology. In B. Bruya (Ed.), Effortless attention: A new perspective in the cognitive science of attention and action (pp. 179–189). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
and, Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2007, May). Music and optimal experience. In G. Turow (Chair), Music, rhythm and the brain. Symposium conducted at the meeting of The Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, Center for Arts, Science and Technology, Stanford, CA.
and, Csikszentmihalyi, M., personal communication, November 8, 2013
and, Lucky, R. (1989). Silicon dreams: Information, man, and machine. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
and, Rajman, M., & Pallota, V. (2007). Speech and language engineering (Computer and Communication Sciences). Lausanne, Switzerland: EPFL Press.”
Excerpt From
The Organized Mind
Daniel J. Levitin
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-organized-mind/id731072740?mt=11