Consciousness @ 1 to 45 Bits per Second

Our body sends millions of bits per second to our brain for processing – millions – yet our conscious mind processes only 1 to 45 bits per second. We are conscious of only millionths of what is out there.

Our brain, though, is not a computer with bits, but a self-organizing, analog, parallel processing system. The similarity with digital computing and bits is that neurons are essentially binary: They fire an action potential if they reach a certain threshold and otherwise do not fire. Considering neurons as bit processing offers a close approximation of the information processing capacity of each of our five senses.

Sensory Receptors Versus Conscious Perception

We can measure how much information enters our brain through the senses by calculating how many receptors each sensor organ possesses, how many nerve connections send signals to the brain, and how many signals each nerve connection sends a second.

The information available to our sensory receptors is astronomical. By the time we are conscious though, we are missing virtually all of this sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch sensory information out there in the world.

Sensory information enters from our eyes, ears, nose, and skin and travels along sensory (afferent) nerves to the brain. The total capacity for our eyes is 10 to 7th power: The eyes send ten million bits/second to the brain versus the 45 to 50 bits/second we consciously perceive. The skin sends a million bits a second to the brain versus 5 bits/sec we consciously perceive. The human body sends millions of bits per second to the brain for processing, yet our conscious mind processes only 1 to 50 bits per second.

Reading silently, our maximum conscious capacity is about 45 bits/sec. Our conscious capacity for spoken speech is about 40 bits/sec. Our conscious capacity for reading aloud is about 30 bits/sec. Our conscious capacity slows to just 12 bits/sec when calculating in our head.

A tremendous compression takes place when 10 million bits per second is reduced to 40 bits per sec. Compression on this massive scale takes time. Research to discover how much time was done by physiologist Benjamin Libet at theUniversity of California, San Francisco. Libet demonstrated that the brain takes a half-second before a person consciously gets this tiny fraction of the total sensory data. The brain discards almost all of the bits of sensory data offering our conscious mind only a few bits and lets our conscious mind think it is making its own decisions a half-second later. But the brain has already decided.

Consciousness: Massive Compression of Data

We live in a world teeming with sensory information, but the brain discloses to the conscious mind only what is necessary to move about, procreate, get nourishment, and ruminate. The body gets lots of sensory feedback, but we cannot talk about or share most of what we experience. We are alone in this great solitude. All we have is our conscious internal voice droning on, lost in ruminations.

We do have some say though, as to what data survives the compression. We can focus our attention anywhere we like, on the light, sound, clothing, itches, odor, posture, or we can focus on the temperature about us. We can use all our senses at once and combine information from them all. We can shut out all of the other senses and focus on listening. 

Because from one instant to the next consciousness can switch from one focus to another, it is not perceived as limited in its capacity. One moment we are aware of the lack of space in our shoes, the next moment of the expanding universe. Consciousness possesses peerless agility. But that does not change the fact that at any given moment we are not conscious of much at all. 

The flow of what goes through our consciousness is limited only by the scope of our imagination. The limit is the volume – 45 bits at any given moment, even though the next moment something quite different may be passing through.

Our brain is pulling the wool over our eyes, creating an illusion that we are seeing what is out there. In effect, we are looking through a pinhole. We are seeing one ten-millionth of what is out there. But no matter how this truth is presented, it runs counter to our intuitive perception of consciousness as vast. Forty-five bits of attention is far from vast.

We are living in a story concocted by our brains. The brain concocts stories to explain to our consciousness what just happened. The brain lies to make things seem right. Even lies that are totally irrational. No way to think our way out of stories within stories. We spend our lives trying, getting tangled in paradox upon paradox. An enormous waste of effort. And a complete waste of therapy if the therapist is unaware of this Alice-in-Wonderland, paradoxical illusion of reality. 

Living on a Time Delay

We are on a half-second time delay — the kind of delay radio stations use to avoid broadcasting words that might violate Federal Communication standards. What we believe is happening this moment happened a half-second ago. Our brain made a half-second calculation of what we require for survival and tossed out the other 99.99999 percent of the data.

David Eagleman demonstrated the concept of this time delay by asking volunteers to press a button to make a light blink. Experimenters programmed a slight delay from the time the person pressed the button to the time the light lit. But after 10 or so presses, people began to see the blink happen as soon as they pressed the button. Then when the experimenters reduced the delay, people reported that the blink happened before they pressed the button.

Eagleman coined this, “recalibration.” Your brain expects your motor actions to produce an immediate effect. So if you were to make the effect happen a tenth of a second after you press the button, the brain recalibrates and makes your pressing the button and the flash of the light instantaneous.

When the experimenter then took away the time delay, the brain recalibrated and made it appear like the light lit before the button was pushed. So you readied to push the button and just before you pushed it, the light came on. So it seemed.

In “Why Time Flies” Alan Burdick went to check this out in person. Eagleman revised his experiment. He used a nine-square cube with one of the squares colored. You press the square where you want the color to move to.

Eagleman programmed a 100-millisecond delay between the mouse click and the movement of the colored square. When Burdick clicked the mouse he did not notice the delay.

Then Eagleman removed the delay and to Burdick’s amazement, the colored square jumped to his chosen destination before he clicked the mouse. It magically knew where he wanted the colored square to jump right before pressed the mouse. Burdick repeated this again and again and each time the computer knew where he wanted the colored square to jump and it jumped right to that square just before he clicked the mouse.

Burdick tried not to press the mouse immediately after he saw the colored block move to his selected square, but he could not stop himself. It was not possible not to click the mouse, because he had already pressed it. When Eagleman had removed the time delay, Burdick’s brain had recalibrated and the colored square seemed to jump before his motor action took place.

Even knowing the reason, it still seemed like the computer magically moved the colored square to his chosen square before he pressed the mouse. And since he had already pressed the mouse, he could not stop himself from doing so.

Free will? Who is deciding? What if you shot a man dead and you thought you had just envisioned shooting him, not actually pulling the trigger? But then you could not stop yourself from pulling the trigger, because you had already done so and killed the man. 

Out of the millions of bits of information our brains process each second, 45 bits give or take are devoted to conscious thought. We can give our total conscious attention to around of one-millionth or 0.000001 of the sensory input available to our brain. We are programmed for virtually total inattention.

No Core Self

How can therapists tag us with a DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) label that sometimes stays for life when we are a state of flux; when there is no center of self? When you peer inside the skull with brain scans, all you can hope to see are areas lighting up from neural or metabolic activity. But we can change this pattern of neural activity and alter lives, while the DSM label is resistant to change.

 

 When you look inside a computer you see hardware; nothing of the myriad universes that unfold to you with clicks of the mouse or taps on a screen. When you open a skull you see three pounds of semi-translucent meat; none of the visual, auditory, perceptual, and tactual imagery. Billions of on-off neurons firing and creating an illusion of self, but this self is nowhere to be found.

No homunculus. No self or consciousness in any specific area of the brain. Neuroscientists cannot comprehend this concept of consciousness. Yet psychiatrists and psychologists peg us with DSM tags.

Internal Universe Parallels External Universe

The Milky Way contains 200 to 400 billion stars. The stars of the Milky Way spread across 100,000 light-years. Of the 86 billion neurons in our brain, about 70 billion are contained in the cerebellum, a small structure at the back of the brain involved with motor control. The entire six-layered cerebral cortex with an average thickness of 3 millimeters, less than a quarter-inch thick, responsible for human thought, has 16 billion neurons. The remaining few billion neurons are spread throughout the rest of the brain.

Stretched out, the cerebral cortex would be about the size of a large cloth dinner napkin that would not easily fit back into a human skull. So our cortex is squished together until it fits into the skull, looking like a walnut blob with its hills called gyri and valleys called sulci.

While the stars are isolated-light years apart, every neuron makes about ten thousand connections or synapses with other nerve cells making a total of about one quadrillion synaptic connections. Specs of neurotransmitter juice flow at these synapses and there are at least a hundred identified neurotransmitters, and likely more.

There are ten times as many glial cells as there are neurons in the brain. Glial cells make up almost 90 percent of the cells in the brain, but up until recently, scientists knew nothing about them. They thought they were just insulators between neurons. They do act as insulators, but glial cells are the dark matter of our internal universe. They speak in a chemical language all their own that scientists have yet to understand. Einstein had an unusually high ratio of glial cells to neurons in the inferior parietal lobe, an area of the brain known to be associated with mathematical and spatial reasoning.

The most abundant of the glial cells are the astrocytes, named for their starlike rays. A single astrocyte can connect with its rays to more than a million synapses. The total number of these astrocyte synapses is astronomical. But what these starlike rays do at these synapses, no one has a clue.

We cannot fathom the chaos of our internal universe, so the brain creates stories about us that give us a 45-bit illusion of self. We rehash these stories, we ruminate day by day, hour by hour, minute after minute. The stories start from the time we are born when a mother responds in a positive, negative, or neutral way. The stories morph through our early years of life. We believe in the stories. We believe in a self that is strong, weak, scared, liked, hated, or popular, or loner. We are trapped in illusions of language. We expand words with modifiers: big nose, skinny, fat legs, stupid, brilliant, feminine, masculine, ugly, handsome, pretty.

The narratives we create about our internal universe are much like stories we created of the external universe. Up until recently, we believed that we were at the central point in the universe. Nicholas Copernicus changed that viewpoint somewhat with the publication of “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres” just before his death in 1543. He waited until just before he died because he would have been in trouble with scientists and with the church had he published his work earlier his lifetime.

Copernicus said we were not the center of the universe. The sun was the center and earth was just one of the planets that revolved around the sun. We, humans, were no longer at the center of the universe, a giant step in the right direction. But since the sun was the center of the universe, we were not that far off from the center.

That belief held sway into the 1920s when Harlow Shapley realized the Milky Way Galaxy was much larger than previously believed. He declared that the Earth is not at the center of our Solar System, our galaxy, or the Universe. But he believed there was only one large galaxy and our sun was off from the center. He believed the center was somewhere off toward the direction of Sagittarius. We were still not that far off-center.

Later in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies in the universe besides the Milky Way. Hubble discovered the universe was expanding. This is a difficult concept to get your head around. It is not like the air expanding inside of a balloon. It means the entire universe is expanding. As the universe expands it is creating new space.

Einstein pointed out that if you live in this expanding universe in the fabric of space and time, no matter where you are it will look like you are at the center. Every center is an illusion. Everyone who looks at the universe sees themselves at the center with all of the other galaxies receding from them. This is how an expanding universe looks from every point of view.

In his 1995 book, “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” Francis Crick, who received the Nobel Prize for his work breaking the DNA code, said that our feelings and thoughts were nothing more than the movement of currents from neural synapse to neural synapse in our brains. This defines materialism. The brain is a material, physical device, and the mind is a construct of the material neural pathways of the brain and does not exist independently of these material neural pathways.

We know the physical, material structure of neurons and we know of neural pathways through the brain. We have no idea, though, how this creates a sense of consciousness and self. Mind or self cannot be found anywhere within these neural pathways. Self and consciousness may be an illusion, much the same as the illusion of looking out at the universe and seeing so clearly that we are the center.

Stigmatization

Kleck and Strenta studied a person’s perception of being stigmatized. They painted a hideous scar on the subject’s face and had the subject look at his face in the mirror. In an instant, he/she was stigmatized with an ostensible facial scar; ostensible because it was not there. Pretending to moisturize the scar to prevent it from cracking, the lab assistant wiped it away leaving no mark at all.

The subjects were then videotaped as they conversed with a partner. They were shown the video in which the camera had focused solely on their partner and they were asked to comment on how their partner was reacting to their scar. The subjects pointed out that their partner was staring at the scar, looking away in disgust and reacting nervously. 

The Great B.S.er Narrator

Kleck & Strenta demonstrated that when subjects believe themselves to be physically stigmatized, they attribute the neutral behavior of others to a negative reaction to their stigma. In fact, during a normal conversation people glance away frequently. Without the influence of the stigma, glancing away is hardly noticed.

The left brain Narrator Interpreter module searches for patterns to fill in to make a contextually coherent story. The Narrator takes the facts it has available and creates the most plausible narrative. You have a hideous scar. The person you are talking to cannot but help from reacting with disgust to the scar. He constantly looks away in disgust and acts nervously.

The Narrator constructs stories on the fly with whatever fits, eliminating anything that might contradict the story. At the same time, the right hemisphere sees things literally, with no attempt at interpretation. The right hemisphere sees the person glancing away now and then without a trace of stigma consciousness. The right brain perceives without filling in and creating a story.

Michael Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and author of “The Ethical Brain” and “Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain,” is credited with coining the name “cognitive neuroscience.” He did a series of experiments isolating the location of the Interpreter or Narrater module to the left hemisphere of the brain. His subjects were split-brain patients whose corpus callosum had been surgically severed to minimize the spread of seizure activity. The corpus callosum is the bundle of neural fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the human and some other higher animal brains. 

With the corpus callosum severed, the right and left hemispheres cannot communicate with each other. It is as if the person now has two entirely separate consciousnesses. When only the right brain sees the event, the left brain is driven to concoct explanations or causes for the event. The Narrator in the left hemisphere has all the words and is the explainer or BSer.

When Gazzaniga presented images to the right visual field (left hemisphere), the patients described the image presented to them. When the same image was presented to the left visual field (right hemisphere), they said they did not see anything. Even though they said they did not see anything, when asked to point to the object, they did. The right hemisphere saw the image and could mobilize a nonverbal response, but could not put the image into a verbal description. Only the left hemisphere connects the image to a narrative.

 

In another of Gazanniga’s experiments with a split-brain patient, the experimenter triggered a negative mood in the right-hemisphere by presenting a frightening video about a man getting pushed into a blazing fire. When asked what she saw, all she could describe was seeing a white flash. The right hemisphere saw the video but could not talk about it or draw inferences. The subject reported feeling nervous and jumpy. 

For some reason, she felt afraid of Dr. Gazanniga who was in the room during the experiment. Her left-brain Interpreter or Narrator attempted to fill in the blanks as to what caused the autonomic emotional response. But her left brain had not seen the video. The only fact it had to go on was that Dr. Gazanniga was in the room asking her questions. So it created a narrative to make sense of what she was feeling by connecting her feeling to fear of Dr. Gazanniga.

With another split-brain patient, the experimenter flashed a picture of a pinup girl to her right hemisphere and the subject responded by laughing. When asked what she saw that made her laugh, she said that she saw nothing, but she was laughing at the funny machine they were using. The left brain with all the words, again created a story to make sense of the funny feeling.

Our brain has no central command system other than the Narrator creating a fictional self, a self that is based upon implicit, buried-deep-beneath-the-surface, for the most part, core beliefs. The Narrator is a part of the conscious brain, a tiny real estate of consciousness. It is difficult to comprehend that our brains are a mind-boggling neural system composed of virtually countless decision-making points and centers of integration that operate 24/7 unconsciously, under our radar. It is impossible to comprehend in any real sense the billions of neurons and modules organized into specialized circuits for specific functions, multiple modules flashing parallel processes throughout the brain. If not for the Narrator offering a simplified, fictional illusion, the chaos would be incomprehensible insanity. So we live ensconced within the Narrator’s 45-bit cache.

We “know” who we are from the Narrator and the Narrator makes up whatever it needs to come up with. No one is behind the curtain pulling levers. No center of consciousness that we know of. The Narrator takes all of the input, meaningful and things with no intrinsic meaning, spinning it all into a narrative that makes a lot of sense and becomes a unified storyline; our concept of self, of “me-ness.” It is this concept of self, based on unconscious, implicit beliefs that cause many of us a tremendous amount of suffering.

We accept and believe in the cohesive and fictional self and world created by the Narrator. We give irrational, harmful thoughts authority because they are intimately connected with this fictional self. Ironically, when these thoughts are most judgmental is when we are convinced they must be true. And when a desire is there, we think the desire is there to be fulfilled, instead of billions of brain modules firing away.

It is the interpretive power of the left brain that gives us the illusion of self. The left-hemisphere Narrator takes myriad neural modules firing throughout the brain and creates an on-the-fly conscious experience and sense of self. This interpretive power of the left brain offers an illusion of unity and control and accounts for much of our feelings and behavior while denying and rationalizing at the same time. Without this left-brain Narrator, we would be lost in the fierce, firefly chaos of billions of neural modules and their unfathomable interconnected pathways firing throughout the brain. 

But the left-brain narrative creation is a slow process and what the Narrator weaves for us has already happened, only appearing to be happening at that instant. We are on a taped delay similar to the few second delay of call-in radio stations used to screen calls before they come on air. The Narrator gives us the illusion that we are making decisions. In fact, the massive, powerful networks of the brain have pooled together and decided for us at least a half-second before we believe we are deciding.

What an enormously difficult concept to grasp, even difficult for the scientists who have proven it so. It is like trying to conceive of where we fit into infinite space that expands forever out in all dimensions. But some grasp of this internal reality can set us free. Knowing that our Narrator spins messages and stories, we can determine what is in our best interest and work at disregarding messages and stories that do us harm. We cannot stop the brain from interpreting and spitting out story narratives, but we can work to create less harmful narratives of who we are or want to become. Our brain does not perceive the difference.

It is a Sisyphean task to change attitudes and behavior. I majored in psychology both in undergraduate and graduate school. I’ve published in professional journals and wrote a self-help psychology book with a foreword by Albert Ellis that was published in Japanese while I was in Japan. It was in all the major bookstores throughout Japan. It sold out two twelve-thousand printings. All that had virtually no effect at changing the way I thought or behaved. While writing a book on Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), I was in counseling for domestic violence.

Most of us assume we think logically and make rational decisions. Albert Ellis believed otherwise. I listened to his weekly Friday night workshops many times over and can still hear him saying, “We are all fucked up fallible human beings, every one of us.” His theory and therapy were grounded on the many thousands of clients he saw over more than fifty years. Research documents he was right. We are not the rational thinkers we think we are.

The right side of the brain engages more with the intuitive and the left side with the rational. Actually, though, the left side of the brain is not rational, since it is home of the Narrator. The Narrator creates and weaves stories to fit with our belief system. It is difficult to question and more difficult to change this narrative that colors everything we perceive. The greatest B.S.er we will ever encounter, the Narrator, resides within our own skull and most of us don’t know, understand, or believe it is there.

Gazzaniga describes how the left-hemisphere is not only a master of belief creation, but it will stick to its belief system no matter what. He illustrates this with a description of a patient with brain damage resulting in “reduplicative paramnesia.” The patient believed that the New York Hospital where she was staying was her own home. When the doctor pointed out that this could not be her home since there was an elevator in the hall, the patient said that she had gone through a great financial sacrifice to install this elevator. 

The left side of her brain was still functioning and kept generating stories to keep her belief system intact no matter what facts it was fed. With other parts of her brain-damaged, she had no way of questioning the stories fed to her by her brain. Though an extreme example, her case offers a picture of how the left-brain Narrator-Interpreter module works to keep a belief system intact on a moment to moment basis. We have an image of ourselves and the world, and the left hemisphere of the brain generates patterns that tie in with this image and belief system. Our sense of self gets attached to and confused with often deceptive messages, stories, beliefs, and feelings even when both our hemispheres are working.

 

Francis Crick, discoverer of the DNA double helix puts it this way: You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

It’s Your Neural Circuits, Stupid!

Much of what we know today about how neurons communicate to form circuits and neural pathways stems from the work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal who in 1906 was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the structure of the nervous system. Considered by many to be the father of modern neuroscience, he pioneered microscopic investigations of neurons, drawing hundreds of illustrations of these brain cells. We learned from his drawings that a neuron consists of a cell body or soma with treelike branches called dendrites bunched more toward one side and a tube called an axon extending from the other side with a one-way transmission of electrical information from the dendrites down to the axonal tip. At the tip, the electrical current becomes a chemical discharge of neurotransmitters into the space called the synaptic gap.

Cajal is popularly known for the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together.” When two neurons fire at the same time, chemical changes occur and they get linked together in circuits. Each time you repeat a behavior or thought, you strengthen neural circuits that become habits and patterns of thinking.

We make ourselves miserable to a large degree because of an illusion of self that is constructed by these linked neural circuits. Over the years we add to this illusion by repeating and building upon these narratives. We are puny and weak and we have the desire to be rich and powerful. We are too feminine and we put up a front of machoness, or too masculine and put up a front of femininity. After years of building neural pathways, our brains have an arsenal of these linked neural chains from which to jog our memories on a minute to minute basis. A neural circuit is a neural circuit and our brain does not distinguish between what is real and what is an illusion and what is beneficial and what is harmful to us.

Psychotherapy and counseling involving endless discussions of childhood trauma can strengthen associated neuronal pathways and build revised memory networks on top of them. Friendships where you constantly share and relive an unfortunate past also serve to strengthen and build upon these pathways. It does not help to constantly reinforce negative images of self and strengthen already powerful neural circuitry.

You alter linked neural pathways by allowing networked modules harmful to you to lose strength, while at the same time building and reinforcing networked modules that are beneficial to you. Building healthy networks of the mind can be harder than bodybuilding though, and bodybuilding takes years of concentrated workouts and diets. But I come from absolute suicidal ground zero and assure you there are no limits. In my eighties, I am yet a work in progress.

Alfred Adler, the co-founder with Freud of the psychoanalytic movement, believed it is extremely difficult to deviate from the patterns of behavior developed in early life. He observed that few individuals have ever been able to change their childhood behavior patterns, even though in adult life they may have found themselves in entirely different situations. Even a change of attitude in adult life does not necessarily lead to a change of behavior. Adler said we select the most expedient error to describe the world as we perceive it and we call this error truth.  Everything we perceive is subjective and fictional.

Extremely difficult to deviate from childhood patterns of behavior, but doable. With a combination of Attention therapies and Cognitive Therapy, starting at insane suicidal ground zero, I have risen from the stifling patterns of behavior formed in early life and am living a pretty decent life.

But it never ends. If you stop working, you slide. It is a never-ending project.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body