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. The paper uses the terms “inner brain” and “outer brain” for that.
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. The paper uses the terms “inner brain” and “outer brain” for that.