Consciousness is Weak

Do you know (I did not), our consciousness (mind), is a midget compared to our operating non-consciousness (brain)? Let me put another way – as humans we are extremely proud of consciousness, our left-brain operation of order and organization, logic and reason. Don’t we see our consciousness as both a civilizing agent, and what separates us from our tree-swinging ancestors?

It is all that, but compared to its counterpart, our sensory and emotional functioning brain-stem, it aint nothing in bandwidth.

Information

Consciousness, get this, accesses information we get to know, only 40 bits per second, while our body sends sensory information of 11 million bits per second to the rest of our non-conscious brain. Notice this, our eyes Fed Ex 10 million bits per second of information, our skin (kinesthetic, sense of touch), UPSs 1 million bits of info per second. Hearing sends about 100,000 bits, and taste and smell together, another 100,000 bits.

Brain structures act on incoming sensory information without letting our consciousness in on the act. Does your car engine communicate with you on the usage of oil, spark plug, and electricity before the system hits critical-mass? You get a signal just before it needs you to take action or the vehicle explodes.

Google: Dr. Dietrich Trincker, German physiologist, University of Kiel;

Google: Professor Manfred Zimmermann, Heidelberg University, in Human

Physiology: The Nervous System in the Context of Information Theory

Summarize it

Let us abstract this reality once more: what we perceive (consciously comprehend), at any moment, is limited to an extremely small compartment in the stream of infor- mation about our surroundings, flowing in from our sense organs. It is about 40 bits per second of info, compared to 11 millions bits of broadband available to our non-conscious brain. Translation: shut up and drive the car until we need you.

If you get this – you deserve a prize: consciousness is not about information, but about its opposite, order. See, consciousness is about an experience of order and organization. Its bandwidth (capacity of consciousness), is infinitesimally small.

We sure produce a lot with so little bandwidth. Maybe we are too proud (indignant), when our consciousness is questioned. What is really going on is operating on feedback loops, on autopilot. Our consciousness is agile, got a lot of moves, but at any specific minute (second), it is aware of shockingly little.

Spotlight

Remember this metaphor, your consciousness is a spotlight, illuminating a specific tree in the forest, and ignoring the others as unworthy of notice. It operates as slow as molasses because it uses serial (one-after-the other in a series). The other guy, your right-brain and the non-consciousness of sensory and emotional information, uses parallel-processing, and multi-tasks a ton of stuff in milliseconds.

Please do not say, OK, I get it, move on, because your mind is scratching and clawing to deny accepting this demeaning reality.

Humans believe the myth that our consciousness is infinite, as immeasurable as the cosmos. It is in reality, a two-foot dwarf, and a tiny pigmy standing in the midst of seven-foot basketball centers.

Profound Statement:

You can choose to direct your attention wherever you like, and experience new worlds of perception. You use your volition (will), to move your concentration to initially discarded information from your senses, and you arrive at a new galaxy.

Focus on smells in your environment, the exact location your hands and feet and what they are feeling, and now switch to imagining a trip to Bloomingdale.

You have freedom of choice to experience specific information entering from your senses and emotions or deny them entrance to your consciousness.

Chunking

George A. Miller, in 1956, at Harvard, wrote in Psychological Review, an article that still resonates for scientists: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.

Who cares?

It proves once again humans are limited in the function of our truly magnificent consciousness. Limited to seven different words, numbers, terms, sounds, phonemes, impressions or thoughts in our head simultaneously. If you are in the business of writing or selling, you might want to remember this human capacity before you try to influence and persuade your audience by inundating them with information.

Wait, you can overcome Miller’s law of Seven by Chunking, perceiving words, ideas, and impressions as an Entity, seeing the big picture, and ignoring the specific (words), elements.

We live on chunking in speed reading, to avoid our 3rd grade training of reading one-multisyllable word at a time. Normal reading strategy causes snailing, loss of comprehension, concentration, and long-term memory. Chunking is separating clauses and phrases in a sentence into piles (bunches), of word groups for cognitive assimilation. You get up to 20% more comprehension in speed reading than snailing bcause you see the big picture, the context of the material.

The benefit of chunking is the ability to read and remember three books, articles and reports in the time your peers can hardly finish even one. Is that a decided competitive advantage, and puts you on the fast-track for promotions or acing school?

We can choose to operate with a maximum of seven microstates, and be limited, or move on to a macrostate, which is virtually unlimited.

Speed reading accesses our right-brain functions using psycho-motor skills, peripheral vision, and a soft-focus, to override the Seven limitation. It permits you to enlarge your foveal centralis, your retina’s sharpest focus, ordinarily limited to a bandwidth of six-letters, (one-word), to 36 letter width (six-words), simultaneously. And they call it, the Birth of the Blues, no, speed reading.

Let end with this fact: acetylcholine (Ach), is a neurotransmitter (chemical compound), from the Central Nervous System and the Parasympathetic Nervous System, that is critical to long-term memory. It also mediates sensory and emotional responses, and minor stuff like hunger, thirst, sex, pleasure and pain.

All that stuff is processed at a non-conscious level. We can consciously contribute relaxation, and avoiding daily chronic stress.

How?

Next time.

See ya,

copyright © 2006 H. Bernard Wechsler www.speedlearning.org hbw@speedlearning.org