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From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: The bandwidth limitation (was: Re: How much info can the brain hold?)
Message-ID: <7988@uwm.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 90 01:55:01 GMT
References: <11941@hubcap.clemson.edu> <7492@hub.ucsb.edu> <3415@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU>
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Organization: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
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In article <3415@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> frank@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU (Frank Breen) writes:
>In one book by Richard Dawkins (the Selfish Gene I think) He
>estimates roughly how many bits per second of input the brain 
>is processing.  I can't remember the details, but it seemed
>surprisingly low, of the order of real time video.
>
>He worked it out from the definition of our vision, hearing etc.
>
>Do people (who've read it) think this means anything or what.
>
>-- 
>Frank Breen            "I am a warrior in the landscape of my mind"
>Monash Uni                                                -unkown?

It's a well-known result that visual processing takes place in the brain too
fast and signals in the brain travel too slow for visual signals to pass
through more than (say) 5 to 10 layers of neurons before having been fully
processed.

It means that there cannot be any complex iterations, searches, or other
similar forms of computation going on during recognition: i.e. no sequential
symbolic processing.

Did you ever play around with a prism?  It effectively computers the Fourier
Transform of an input signal by shuffling light quanta among a lattice of
particles (or something like that): all in parallel and all in an extremely
short time ... but yet uses no symbolic algorithm to accomplish its result.
There's an analogy for you...


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