I have been thinking about this question in some depth.
It basically applies to any human brain and it has nothing to do with neurodivergence.
Think about a video game. There’s a lot going on. There’s millions of pixels on the screen. But when you know the game, your decisions are based on a very high level understanding of what’s going on. Maybe, you recognize what NPC enemy you are facing and what move they are making. If there are 16 different enemies, then that’s only 4 bits of information. If every NPC has 8 different moves, then that’s only another 3 bits.
You make the high-level decisions based on very few bits of information. You implement the decisions by pushing buttons. When you are skilled, you don’t have to think about the buttons, or what your fingers do. Some part of your brain is taking in a lot of information about what your fingers sense via touch, the angle of the joints (proprioception), and so on. Then a large number of muscles is controlled in perfect harmony to hit the keys.
The paper gives the estimate that our senses deliver 1 billion bits/s to the brain. But the higher level thinking has a throughput of only a little over 10 bits/s. I called it conscious thought but that’s not exactly right. The paper talks about the “inner brain” and “outer brain”.
Feeling flooded by information may have to do with lacking the necessary skill in preprocessing to extract the relevant information. In the video game example, I gave above, that would mean not knowing the possible enemies or their moves. It may also reflect a failure to prioritize appropriately. That is, only making the necessary information available to the decision-making process. That is said to be a factor in ADHD.
That feeling might also simply be an illusion, like a déjà vu.
Individual differences in throughput are probably related to intelligence but that’s not related to neurodivergence. People who are perceived as intelligent, for example, use a bigger vocabulary. That is, they chose their words from a larger number of possibilities, which implies a higher information throughput all else equal. However, in terms of bits, that difference is certainly small.
10 bits means picking 1 out of 1024 possibilities. 11 bits allow 1 out of 2048 possibilities. Every bit doubles the number. More bit/s would either allow more different choices or twice as many decisions. Some people seem to think faster than others or seem to consider a bigger space of solutions in the same time. If their throughput is 3 bits higher than average, they would be able to think 8 times faster or consider 8 times more possibilities. Thinking about how fast people talk/write or what vocabulary they use, I think there’s hardly anyone who’s that much above average.
I have been thinking about this question in some depth.
It basically applies to any human brain and it has nothing to do with neurodivergence.
Think about a video game. There’s a lot going on. There’s millions of pixels on the screen. But when you know the game, your decisions are based on a very high level understanding of what’s going on. Maybe, you recognize what NPC enemy you are facing and what move they are making. If there are 16 different enemies, then that’s only 4 bits of information. If every NPC has 8 different moves, then that’s only another 3 bits.
You make the high-level decisions based on very few bits of information. You implement the decisions by pushing buttons. When you are skilled, you don’t have to think about the buttons, or what your fingers do. Some part of your brain is taking in a lot of information about what your fingers sense via touch, the angle of the joints (proprioception), and so on. Then a large number of muscles is controlled in perfect harmony to hit the keys.
The paper gives the estimate that our senses deliver 1 billion bits/s to the brain. But the higher level thinking has a throughput of only a little over 10 bits/s. I called it conscious thought but that’s not exactly right. The paper talks about the “inner brain” and “outer brain”.
Feeling flooded by information may have to do with lacking the necessary skill in preprocessing to extract the relevant information. In the video game example, I gave above, that would mean not knowing the possible enemies or their moves. It may also reflect a failure to prioritize appropriately. That is, only making the necessary information available to the decision-making process. That is said to be a factor in ADHD.
That feeling might also simply be an illusion, like a déjà vu.
Individual differences in throughput are probably related to intelligence but that’s not related to neurodivergence. People who are perceived as intelligent, for example, use a bigger vocabulary. That is, they chose their words from a larger number of possibilities, which implies a higher information throughput all else equal. However, in terms of bits, that difference is certainly small.
10 bits means picking 1 out of 1024 possibilities. 11 bits allow 1 out of 2048 possibilities. Every bit doubles the number. More bit/s would either allow more different choices or twice as many decisions. Some people seem to think faster than others or seem to consider a bigger space of solutions in the same time. If their throughput is 3 bits higher than average, they would be able to think 8 times faster or consider 8 times more possibilities. Thinking about how fast people talk/write or what vocabulary they use, I think there’s hardly anyone who’s that much above average.