7 ms·

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our e

Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Language requires lots of context, common understanding, and being able to view the world from the other person's perspective to make sense of the tiny amount of information that one person is sharing with another

oh_sigh 9y ago
Nit: we don't absorb gigabits of information. Perhaps there is that much bombarding our senses St any given moment but the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max
- jostmey 9y ago
  We definitely absorb huge amounts of information -- but only a fraction of that information reaches the conscious level. Just google search "unconscious visual processing"
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Not even concuious level - I'm talking about information that even makes it into all but the shallowest levels of your brain
- dTal 9y ago
  So your visual cortex isn't in your brain? Would you care to point out which region(s) of the brain only receive hundreds of bits/sec? Somebody should tell the lossy video compression folks.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in the optic nerves (approximately 1 million axons in each) only ~6x10^6 bits/sec leave the retina and only 10^4 make it to layer IV of V1 [22,23]. These data clearly leave the impression that visual cortex receives an impoverished representation of the world, a subject of more than passing interest to those interested in the processing of visual information [24]. Parenthetically, it should be noted that estimates of the bandwidth of conscious awareness itself (i.e. what we ‘see’) are in the range of 100 bits/sec or less [22,23] Estimates of quantified human sensory system throughput. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Estimates_of_quantified_human_sensory_system_throughput10 https://www.researchgate.net/post/Estimates_of_quantified_hu... [accessed Jun 20, 2017].
    - ClassyJacket 9y ago
      You seem to be confusing the idea of the brain storing information in long term memory with the brain receiving information. Not all information processed is stored. If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        I'd argue this isn't a confusing but a distinguishing. oh_sigh is being downvoted for truth.
      - oh_sigh 9y ago
        Considering the optic nerve can only tramsit ~6 Mbits/sec, and layer 4 of v1 in your visual cortext only gets ~10 kbits/sec, I would say you are wrong. To test this, try seeing if you can distinguish HD from SD without the use of your fovea. You have one highly detailed section of your eye, and the rest is low quality input which is "upgraded" through previous sightings with the fovea and your brains knowledge of how it thinks the world works. See 'foveated rendering' which will be important in the VR world, to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  This is incorrect. Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair. Perhaps you meant we only commit a few hundred bits of information to long term memory per second under uninteresting conditions? *Sorry for piling on! I didn't see the other two replies and went to get coffee before finishing my reply.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    I guess I have a question of what OP meant when saying your sensory organs "absorb" gigabits per second of information. In my reading, I took that to mean sensory input that actually makes it into the brain. After all, asphalt absorbs that same information, but I don't think that is a particularly interesting use of the infirmation. In another reply I quoted research that shows that only ~10 kbits/sec make it even into layer 4 of v1 from the optic nerve. If you have anything talking about spinal processing I'd love to read it.
    - ABCLAW 9y ago
      Not sure what you're looking for specifically, but a quick search for Spinal Nerve (or bundle!) Processing will give you a ton of results. Restrict yourself to pub med or google scholar, because there are a lot of mediocre results. I think the main confusion here was over the definition of 'absorb'. Your version is much narrower than I'd use. The sensory molecular pathways and accompanying structure of nerves themselves produce significant processing right at the outset which your definition would entirely discount. There is no reason to discount what would otherwise become 'pre-processing' in your model.
  - Someone 9y ago
    oh_sigh: "the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max" ABCLAW: "Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair." Does that information actually make it to the brain? I thought sending a signal to the brain to process it there and then send back balancing signals would take too much time to keep you on your feet (at around 100m/s, a nerve signal would take about 1/50 of a second to move from legs to brain and back) There also is evidence that your spine can do quite a bit of the muscle control needed for balancing on its own. See knee reflex and spinal cat (completely cut the spinal cord of a cat in the neck; notice that cat is paralyzed. Hang cat in harness, with feet on a treadmill. Turn on treadmill; cat walks (possibly only after some training; I don't know the details). Known since the 1950's. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/ (paywalled)).
- giardini 9y ago
  Oh_sigh says:"...we don't absorb gigabits of information." We're talking bits/second (bandwidth) here, not simply bits. So given that... The human visual pathway has a bandwidth of about 10 megabits per second, so we build the current "view" somewhere in our brain and constantly update it with the stream of data from the visual pathways (there are several). So we're always scanning visually, always updating our view with new info.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Well, OP never specified, so neither did I, but I did suspect that they were talking about per second. To say we absorb gigabits of information over 90 years is a different story, and one which I assumed OP wasn't talking about.
dTal 9y ago
Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the limiting factor in coding productivity is speed of thought, not speed of typing.
- cmurf 9y ago
  When simultaneously translated English to Spanish, my translators complained because I speak fast, and they'd tell me they can't keep up. When I slow down enough, I end up losing my train of thought, so I had to practice speaking slower. Also it might differ Mexican Spanish vs Castilian, where I didn't get much of a complaint by Castilian translators.
  - pbh101 9y ago
    Your scenario introduce 'translation' as an additional task. I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the bottleneck, rather than anything specific to either the input or output language processing.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    For me, it's not so much losing my train of thought but it drops me out of any sort of real conversational mode. At which point, I can feel like I'm giving up any sort of real engagement and just saying words. (Though, in my experience, simultaneous translators I've worked with and listened to are pretty good. They seem to usually do a better than decent job even for speakers going along at a "normal" pace.)
- gasbag 9y ago
  > So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Yet the way in which we must structure information surely plays a role in how quickly we can do it, right? I can certainly read faster than I can speak, and I'm also confident that I can read with full comprehension faster than I can listen with full comprehension to someone speaking very fast, like at the end of a medicine commercial or the Micro Machines guy. Take for example a physics teacher. They are fond of drawing diagrams because it's a quicker and easier way to refer to the concepts in play than relying on words alone. If we had the capability to project the imagery that accompanies our thoughts so that others could see it, I suspect we'd have to do a lot less talking. And in fact we practice this already with feelings and body language--most of us know when we've committed a faux pas before anybody says a word about it. The same goes for programming: my thought is "i want to get all of the user's preferences", which is surely faster than finding where to put the query, when to call it, and then testing its correctness. This is one of the things that Alan Kay and Bret Victor go on about--getting the machine to be usable at a level that is closer to the problem space than to machine code. I understand what you meant, that typing at 300 WPM won't help you to design a system. But a visual development environment that actually works probably would, because it would let you work at a more conceptual level most of the time instead of typing magic words into a terminal.
pishpash 9y ago
That's why a picture is worth a thousand words :)
edjroot 9y ago
> We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. That's pretty much what Elon Musk cites as his motivation for Neuralink.
joe_the_user 9y ago
"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?] I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate. The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a fairly low bitrate. The simple explanation for this is that a language stream is something like a computer program - difficult to either produce or absorb. And of course, language with complex structures is fairly unique to humans and provides some amazing things - the ability to help organize society and our own activity on a larger scale, to plan ahead, and etc, and etc, etc.... Edit: Good general discussion of these issues can be found in Tor Norretranders' book The User Illusion. Highly recommended.
- ifdefdebug 9y ago
  > I don't think that's true. It's literally true for what we are doing right now in this moment: emitting information through a keyboard. But even then, it feels like we are doing much better than that. Maybe because we use implicit cross-referencing all the time.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    > It's literally true for what we are doing right now in this moment: emitting information through a keyboard. The claim is that we _can't_ emit more than a few bits per second, and the rebuttal is that we can. Providing an example that's under the threshold is completely irrelevant.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  The audio channel is not the information channel. There's an interesting video on the fastest meaningful musical tempo or speed, which looks at the interonset interval. It turns out that between 100ms and 50ms seems to be that limit: 10 to 20 beats per second. Or, at the low end, 20 Hz. Which is the point at which a series of beats becomes a tone. If you extend this out to a full day, and consider each beat a bit, via GNU Units: You have: 20 bit/s You want: M bit /day * 1.728 / 0.5787037 That is, the human auditory system is capable of processing at best 1.7 megabits of beat-based information per day. That's only 0.2 MB (bytes), or a small fraction of an old-school 3.5" floppy disk. Mind, that's individual beats, which isn't how we convey information, but it's an interesting data rate limitation. Language encodes at different levels, and arguably people might be able to operate at higher levels. For spoken English, most of us can accommodate roughly 100 words/min. A typical college-educated adult can read 300 words/minute, and at the high end, perhaps double that. (The less literate are closer to the 100 words/min of spoken speech.) If a word is considered as 8 bytes (7 characters and a space), then a sustained maximum-rate reading pace would allow for just shy 7 MB per day of information consumed. Speaking? About 1.1 MB/day. Both of those assume a full 24 hour day without break, interruption, or sleep. We can absorb more information in the form of complex tonal or visual signals, but I'd argue that the retention of that information is highly limited. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8
davesque 9y ago
To say this is to assume that no information is communicated through facial expressions, body language, tone, rhythm, etc. Furthermore, assuming all relevant information is contained in a person's words alone, it's also impossible to say that a particular bit rate representation of an utterance faithfully reproduces all of that information.
- andrewflnr 9y ago
  Non-verbal communication is definitely something for GP to consider, but doesn't change their point very much. The amount of information you can convey directly through your body is still a tiny fraction of what goes through your mind. And guess what, you still need tons of context to decode body language, rhythm, etc.
lend000 9y ago
> we can only emit a few bits of information. Perhaps if you measure against the text representation in ASCII, but it's not necessarily easy to quantify all of the other meaningful information that comes from tone, volume, accent, gestures, etc. Such is to say that monkeys and birds can effectively transmit no information, which is not true.

oh_sigh 9y ago

Nit: we don't absorb gigabits of information. Perhaps there is that much bombarding our senses St any given moment but the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max

jostmey 9y ago
We definitely absorb huge amounts of information -- but only a fraction of that information reaches the conscious level. Just google search "unconscious visual processing"
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Not even concuious level - I'm talking about information that even makes it into all but the shallowest levels of your brain
dTal 9y ago
So your visual cortex isn't in your brain? Would you care to point out which region(s) of the brain only receive hundreds of bits/sec? Somebody should tell the lossy video compression folks.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in the optic nerves (approximately 1 million axons in each) only ~6x10^6 bits/sec leave the retina and only 10^4 make it to layer IV of V1 [22,23]. These data clearly leave the impression that visual cortex receives an impoverished representation of the world, a subject of more than passing interest to those interested in the processing of visual information [24]. Parenthetically, it should be noted that estimates of the bandwidth of conscious awareness itself (i.e. what we ‘see’) are in the range of 100 bits/sec or less [22,23] Estimates of quantified human sensory system throughput. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Estimates_of_quantified_human_sensory_system_throughput10 https://www.researchgate.net/post/Estimates_of_quantified_hu... [accessed Jun 20, 2017].
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    You seem to be confusing the idea of the brain storing information in long term memory with the brain receiving information. Not all information processed is stored. If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      I'd argue this isn't a confusing but a distinguishing. oh_sigh is being downvoted for truth.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Considering the optic nerve can only tramsit ~6 Mbits/sec, and layer 4 of v1 in your visual cortext only gets ~10 kbits/sec, I would say you are wrong. To test this, try seeing if you can distinguish HD from SD without the use of your fovea. You have one highly detailed section of your eye, and the rest is low quality input which is "upgraded" through previous sightings with the fovea and your brains knowledge of how it thinks the world works. See 'foveated rendering' which will be important in the VR world, to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
ABCLAW 9y ago
This is incorrect. Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair. Perhaps you meant we only commit a few hundred bits of information to long term memory per second under uninteresting conditions? *Sorry for piling on! I didn't see the other two replies and went to get coffee before finishing my reply.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I guess I have a question of what OP meant when saying your sensory organs "absorb" gigabits per second of information. In my reading, I took that to mean sensory input that actually makes it into the brain. After all, asphalt absorbs that same information, but I don't think that is a particularly interesting use of the infirmation. In another reply I quoted research that shows that only ~10 kbits/sec make it even into layer 4 of v1 from the optic nerve. If you have anything talking about spinal processing I'd love to read it.
  - ABCLAW 9y ago
    Not sure what you're looking for specifically, but a quick search for Spinal Nerve (or bundle!) Processing will give you a ton of results. Restrict yourself to pub med or google scholar, because there are a lot of mediocre results. I think the main confusion here was over the definition of 'absorb'. Your version is much narrower than I'd use. The sensory molecular pathways and accompanying structure of nerves themselves produce significant processing right at the outset which your definition would entirely discount. There is no reason to discount what would otherwise become 'pre-processing' in your model.
- Someone 9y ago
  oh_sigh: "the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max" ABCLAW: "Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair." Does that information actually make it to the brain? I thought sending a signal to the brain to process it there and then send back balancing signals would take too much time to keep you on your feet (at around 100m/s, a nerve signal would take about 1/50 of a second to move from legs to brain and back) There also is evidence that your spine can do quite a bit of the muscle control needed for balancing on its own. See knee reflex and spinal cat (completely cut the spinal cord of a cat in the neck; notice that cat is paralyzed. Hang cat in harness, with feet on a treadmill. Turn on treadmill; cat walks (possibly only after some training; I don't know the details). Known since the 1950's. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/ (paywalled)).
giardini 9y ago
Oh_sigh says:"...we don't absorb gigabits of information." We're talking bits/second (bandwidth) here, not simply bits. So given that... The human visual pathway has a bandwidth of about 10 megabits per second, so we build the current "view" somewhere in our brain and constantly update it with the stream of data from the visual pathways (there are several). So we're always scanning visually, always updating our view with new info.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Well, OP never specified, so neither did I, but I did suspect that they were talking about per second. To say we absorb gigabits of information over 90 years is a different story, and one which I assumed OP wasn't talking about.

dTal 9y ago

Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the limiting factor in coding productivity is speed of thought, not speed of typing.

cmurf 9y ago
When simultaneously translated English to Spanish, my translators complained because I speak fast, and they'd tell me they can't keep up. When I slow down enough, I end up losing my train of thought, so I had to practice speaking slower. Also it might differ Mexican Spanish vs Castilian, where I didn't get much of a complaint by Castilian translators.
- pbh101 9y ago
  Your scenario introduce 'translation' as an additional task. I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the bottleneck, rather than anything specific to either the input or output language processing.
- ghaff 9y ago
  For me, it's not so much losing my train of thought but it drops me out of any sort of real conversational mode. At which point, I can feel like I'm giving up any sort of real engagement and just saying words. (Though, in my experience, simultaneous translators I've worked with and listened to are pretty good. They seem to usually do a better than decent job even for speakers going along at a "normal" pace.)
gasbag 9y ago
> So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Yet the way in which we must structure information surely plays a role in how quickly we can do it, right? I can certainly read faster than I can speak, and I'm also confident that I can read with full comprehension faster than I can listen with full comprehension to someone speaking very fast, like at the end of a medicine commercial or the Micro Machines guy. Take for example a physics teacher. They are fond of drawing diagrams because it's a quicker and easier way to refer to the concepts in play than relying on words alone. If we had the capability to project the imagery that accompanies our thoughts so that others could see it, I suspect we'd have to do a lot less talking. And in fact we practice this already with feelings and body language--most of us know when we've committed a faux pas before anybody says a word about it. The same goes for programming: my thought is "i want to get all of the user's preferences", which is surely faster than finding where to put the query, when to call it, and then testing its correctness. This is one of the things that Alan Kay and Bret Victor go on about--getting the machine to be usable at a level that is closer to the problem space than to machine code. I understand what you meant, that typing at 300 WPM won't help you to design a system. But a visual development environment that actually works probably would, because it would let you work at a more conceptual level most of the time instead of typing magic words into a terminal.

pishpash 9y ago

That's why a picture is worth a thousand words :)

edjroot 9y ago

> We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. That's pretty much what Elon Musk cites as his motivation for Neuralink.

joe_the_user 9y ago

"but we can only emit a few bits of information" [per second?] I don't think that's true. Physical motion and even sound making in total involves a human being producing a lot more than a few bits of information per second - there are plenty of recordings of people singing, say, that can't compressed to that bitrate. The only thing that's true is that we can pretty much only emit and absorb language information at a fairly low bitrate. The simple explanation for this is that a language stream is something like a computer program - difficult to either produce or absorb. And of course, language with complex structures is fairly unique to humans and provides some amazing things - the ability to help organize society and our own activity on a larger scale, to plan ahead, and etc, and etc, etc.... Edit: Good general discussion of these issues can be found in Tor Norretranders' book The User Illusion. Highly recommended.

ifdefdebug 9y ago
> I don't think that's true. It's literally true for what we are doing right now in this moment: emitting information through a keyboard. But even then, it feels like we are doing much better than that. Maybe because we use implicit cross-referencing all the time.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > It's literally true for what we are doing right now in this moment: emitting information through a keyboard. The claim is that we _can't_ emit more than a few bits per second, and the rebuttal is that we can. Providing an example that's under the threshold is completely irrelevant.
dredmorbius 9y ago
The audio channel is not the information channel. There's an interesting video on the fastest meaningful musical tempo or speed, which looks at the interonset interval. It turns out that between 100ms and 50ms seems to be that limit: 10 to 20 beats per second. Or, at the low end, 20 Hz. Which is the point at which a series of beats becomes a tone. If you extend this out to a full day, and consider each beat a bit, via GNU Units: You have: 20 bit/s You want: M bit /day * 1.728 / 0.5787037 That is, the human auditory system is capable of processing at best 1.7 megabits of beat-based information per day. That's only 0.2 MB (bytes), or a small fraction of an old-school 3.5" floppy disk. Mind, that's individual beats, which isn't how we convey information, but it's an interesting data rate limitation. Language encodes at different levels, and arguably people might be able to operate at higher levels. For spoken English, most of us can accommodate roughly 100 words/min. A typical college-educated adult can read 300 words/minute, and at the high end, perhaps double that. (The less literate are closer to the 100 words/min of spoken speech.) If a word is considered as 8 bytes (7 characters and a space), then a sustained maximum-rate reading pace would allow for just shy 7 MB per day of information consumed. Speaking? About 1.1 MB/day. Both of those assume a full 24 hour day without break, interruption, or sleep. We can absorb more information in the form of complex tonal or visual signals, but I'd argue that the retention of that information is highly limited. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8

davesque 9y ago

To say this is to assume that no information is communicated through facial expressions, body language, tone, rhythm, etc. Furthermore, assuming all relevant information is contained in a person's words alone, it's also impossible to say that a particular bit rate representation of an utterance faithfully reproduces all of that information.

andrewflnr 9y ago
Non-verbal communication is definitely something for GP to consider, but doesn't change their point very much. The amount of information you can convey directly through your body is still a tiny fraction of what goes through your mind. And guess what, you still need tons of context to decode body language, rhythm, etc.

lend000 9y ago

> we can only emit a few bits of information. Perhaps if you measure against the text representation in ASCII, but it's not necessarily easy to quantify all of the other meaningful information that comes from tone, volume, accent, gestures, etc. Such is to say that monkeys and birds can effectively transmit no information, which is not true.