I don't buy the 2bps argument. People with perfect pitch, for example, can tell you in less than 1s what note you're playing on a 88-key keyboard (6.45 bps). Even an average amature musician can tell you the interval between two notes in less than 1 second (3.58 bps). Perhaps the true/false questions that were asked were insufficient to provide the full range of data that is procesed by the brain, partially because of vocabulary limits (how do you describe the "amount" of light, or level of sound, or pitch modulation, without having a tool to measure it? Yet we still can distinguish between really small levels).
Another problem with the 2bps analogy is that you can't capture the entropy of a concept in bits, and that's a major factor in human memory. (Ever crammed for a test in a class you don't understand?)
I also think that some of these other numbers are high. MPEG, JPEG, wavelet, and MP3 compression show that not all the information we store to reproduce something electronically is actually significant to the human mind.
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I don't buy the 2bps argument. People with perfect pitch, for example, can tell you in less than 1s what note you're playing on a 88-key keyboard (6.45 bps). Even an average amature musician can tell you the interval between two notes in less than 1 second (3.58 bps). Perhaps the true/false questions that were asked were insufficient to provide the full range of data that is procesed by the brain, partially because of vocabulary limits (how do you describe the "amount" of light, or level of sound, or pitch modulation, without having a tool to measure it? Yet we still can distinguish between really small levels).
Another problem with the 2bps analogy is that you can't capture the entropy of a concept in bits, and that's a major factor in human memory. (Ever crammed for a test in a class you don't understand?)
I also think that some of these other numbers are high. MPEG, JPEG, wavelet, and MP3 compression show that not all the information we store to reproduce something electronically is actually significant to the human mind.
Just my 2c.