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.
For my last colonoscopy I did not want to be put to sleep. So I was given a conscious sedating drug. I was awake and could respond to the doctor. But I could not remember anything from the time I was given the drug untill I was fully dressed and the nurse was checking to see if I was conscious. I had no memory of dressing, putting on my shoes and tying the laces, but I had done all that on my own. And suddenly I found myself sitting there talking with the nurse.
My condo neighbor Misha, who had a similar drug, told me something amazing. He did not recover consciousness until he was standing by the car with his friend who had accompanied him. His friend told Misha that he had held a half-hour session with the doctor after the procedure and had asked detailed questions and was shown an image from the procedure.
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. The brain is not much inconvenienced when the conscious mind is sedated.
Near Total Inattention
A tremendous compression takes place when 10 million bits per second is reduced to 45 bits per sec. Compression on this massive scale takes time. Research to discover how much time was done by physiologist Benjamin Libbet at University of California, San Francisco. Libbet 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.
There is substantial critique of Libbet’s work, but the research of David Eagleman sets it back on solid ground.
Electric Brain
Living on a Time Delay
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 caught onto the delay and 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.
For his book “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 actually already pressed the mouse, he could not stop himself from doing so.
Expand Attention
We do have some say though, as to what data survives the brain’s compression. We can focus our attention anywhere we like, on sound, space, posture, breathing, Insight Meditation, or we can focus on unresolvable issues.
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.
You can suffer intensely or do miracles with just 45 bits of attention. I went from raging, violent monster to caring husband and father. I was suicidal. I went through a series of Electric Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and searched for a surgeon to perform a lobotomy – anything to exit the bizarre, introspective maze . Thankfully, my search was in vain.
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
