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Auditive processing speeds in the brain

My understanding of the brain - from the best guesses I've obtained - is that it is quite good at accumulating perceptions but quite bad at processing them.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimate that the human retina can transmit visual input at about the same rate as an Ethernet connection, one of the most common local area network systems used today (roughly 10 million bits per second). They present their findings in the July issue of Current Biology.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news73156830.html#jCp

I believe that for audio signals it's around 100,000 bits per second

http://www.thesoundlearningcentre.co.uk/the-cause/processing/

However, the best estimate I have for the rate of processing this input is around 100 bits per second.

http://redefinepossible.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/what-are-you-missing/

http://www.buffalostate.edu/creativity/documents/preumontf06.pdf See page 13:
"Wenger (1996), who invented Image Streaming as a form of tapping into the
subconscious mind, explains that the conscious mind is a skill with limited usefulness.
The human brain, he says, can pay attention to “only about 126 bits of information per
second… yet your minds are flooded each second by perceptions involving hundreds of
times more than 126 bits"

This is all very interesting stuff, and the simple conclusion is that we all have "golden ears" but we are absolutely crap at processing what we hear (or rather our brains are extremely clever at ignoring things).

This seems to support the general idea that a lot of people claim to "hear" things but disagree constantly about what they are hearing. An analogy is the notorious unreliability of eye witnesses. We just don't have the processing ability to deal with all the sensory data we receive.

andy


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  • Auditive processing speeds in the brain - andy evans 00:43:27 09/05/12 (0)

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