Human Bottleneck

10 Bits/Sec Bottleneck in outward information flow - Paul Fitts Paper

Richard — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:17:06 +0000

There appears to be a remarkably tight information bottleneck when communication unfamiliar information outwards into the world (~10 Bits/Sec). Paul Fitt's experiments reveal this for manual movements of varying precision

What if it’s all wrong and we have no bottleneck?

Richard — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:37:32 +0100

“Suppose it’s all wrong and we have no bottleneck”, What would be the consequences?

Has the bottleneck speed varied with human evolution

Richard — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:34:19 +0100

So an interesting question is whether the bottleneck speed has varied with human evolution.

FRCs – 10 – Questioning if mind is really “nearly empty at birth”

Richard — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:11:46 +0100

FRCs – 10 – Challenging my suggestion that the Black Box of the mind is “nearly empty at birth”

Consciousness? - Let’s lose Consciousness!

Richard — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:56:15 +0100

Let's avoid the use of the word consciousness on this blog

Time stands still during an accident - Is this the bottleneck in action?

Richard — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:09:15 +0100

Does the bottleneck relate to the experience of Time Standing Still when we have an accident?

Bit Rate In Versus Internal Bits Lost ?

Rioja the Dioja — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:04:38 +0000

Hi Richard,

Given that we have a very low idling bit-rate and also forget things at a certain rate (or rather we seem unable to access at will, associations of many things that stimulate the re-creation of a pattern of connection leading to the activation of a memory) is it conceivable that the overall bit-rate summed at the interface could be negative ? or maybe negative at times ? For example the day after a memory test, how many of the memory wizards can repeat the sequence they just remembered ? Similarly students who cram for an exam rapidly forget what they have learned after an exam. Maybe i'm mixing up stored data or more accurately potential data with data rates but there must be a rate for memory loss. (This is a different argument to the huge loss at any one time of data that is dumped internally that leads to our latency of awareness)

I suppose as one gets older the rate fluctuates with deeper negative excursions than positive ones compared with our youth. Also what do you reckon is our 'idling' bit-rate when we are, say day-dreaming, rather than actively trying to remember something.

I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing because I don't think these arguments are acounting for the vast network of connectivity in the brain and the rich inner experience of awareness, irrespective of how much that is an illusion of what lies beyond the interface. The other contribution to a net negative rate is of course cell death which occurs all the time. If we lose 10% of our brain cells that still leaves ~ 10^ 10 cells and more importantly given that one cell can be wired to up to 10,000 others the connectivity is an impossibly large number ( eg for n neurons the net sum of different patterns of connection taking two at a time, three at a time etc = 2^(n(n-1)/2) - 1 ie only 7 brain cells leads to over 2 million possible patterns of connection (assuming complete plasticity of all cells ie connectable to all others)

Cheers,

Rioja

Short burst memory records added

Richard — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:12:34 +0000

Added data points for short duration records by Ramón Campayo (1/2 sec to 4 seconds)

The Memory Champions Technique

Richard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:35:01 +0000

Ben Pridmore, World Memory Champion describes how he groups cards and digits in chunks, to maximise his speed

Adders are Faster

Richard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:53:10 +0000

Adders are faster than Rememberers and Multipliers

The most effective memory technique is a narrative

gofor — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:11:04 +0000

The most effective memory technique used by the world record holders, is based on a narrative around a journey

Are the memory tests untypical?

gofor — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:05:40 +0000

Are the memory tests using digits or playing cards untypical of human learning tasks?

Corrected error brings points on memory graph closer together

gofor — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:49:12 +0000

Corrected bit/symbol error for playing cards now brings points on memory graph for cards and decimal digits closer together

Black Box - Interfaces & PC analogy

Richard — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:47:44 +0000

Black Box model - Judge by measured performance, not by what someone tells you! + PC Analogy

The Aliens Have Landed

Richard — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:07:36 +0000

The Extra Terrestrials want to know if we are capable of learning from them

FRCs – 9 - Location of the interface

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:37:34 +0000

the interface sits somewhere between the hard-wired neural processing behind the eyes, ears, and other sensors, and the inner processing related to consciousness

FRCs – 8 - Reflexes

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:51:12 +0000

The only thing that the brain needs to do quickly, is to work out whether to flinch away

FRCs – 7 - Looking for Patterns

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:49:12 +0000

"Surely we're designed for looking at certain patterns of information"

FRCs – 6 - what limits the memory test performance?

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:47:27 +0000

Your tests make an assumption about being limited by a communications bottleneck, rather than memory speed.

FRCs – 5 Four letter test

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:42:56 +0000

"How do we know the 4-letter words that we initially failed to remember are not acquired or transferred to the brain cells?"

FRCs– 4 - Memory tests are untypical for humans

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:38:48 +0000

"The memory test examples are untypical for humans. Surely we are much faster at other tasks?"

FRCs – 3 - Does intelligence increase the bit rate?

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:35:51 +0000

"Doesn’t our intelligence increase the amount of information we can take in through our senses?"

FRCs - 2 - Parallelism

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:34:08 +0000

"The human mind has massive parallelism; doesn’t that mean that we take in so much more?"

FRCs - 1 - Surely we take in a huge amount of information

Richard — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:30:49 +0000

"When I perceive a scene or an object, don’t I take in a huge amount of information?"

Welcome to the Human Bottleneck Blog

Richard — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:56:49 +0000

There is little evidence that our human mind can absorb more than a few bits per second of truly novel information. This is shockingly small. Where is the evidence to the contrary?