Subconscious Processes 27,500 Times More Data than the Conscious Mind

Your conscious mind is the intern who thinks they're running the company.

Your senses pull in 11 million bits per second. That's the bandwidth of a typical cable internet connection, or the amount needed to stream high-definition video into your skull. Quite impressive, until you realize where most of it goes.

Source

Notice that taste is bringing up the rear at a measly 1,000 bits per second. Evolution apparently decided you don't need much bandwidth to distinguish "edible" from "poison." Fair enough.

Now here's the embarrassing part. When researchers measured how much information your conscious mind actually processes during "intelligent" activities like reading or playing piano, they found it maxes out at 50 bits per second.

Let's check that math. The average person reads 250 words per minute, or about 5 words per second.

250 words per minute / 60 seconds = 5 words/second

The average word has 5 characters. Each character requires 16 bits of storage in Unicode. So each word is 80 bits.

5 characters x 16 bits = 80 bits/word

Multiply that by 5 words per second and you get 400 bits per second of conscious processing.

5 words/second x 80 bits/word = 400 bits/second

So you're absorbing 11 million bits per second, but only consciously processing 400. The rest is handled by your subconscious, which means:

11,000,000 / 400 = 27,500

Your subconscious is processing 27,500 times more information than your conscious mind.

You're not actually thinking most of your thoughts. You're just the guy who takes credit for them at meetings.

The subconscious is called that because it's not conscious, which is why you don't know what it's doing. Quite sneaky, really. If your subconscious were a person, it would be someone who does all your work while you sleep, then lets you present it to the boss in the morning. Except you can't even say thank you, because you don't know they exist.

It's a bit like finding out you've had a personal assistant for your entire life, but they've been invisible and you never got their name. And they're better at your job than you are. By a factor of 27,500.