11 million bits per second
Here’s what I didn’t know… that our brain receives about 11 million bits of information per second from our sensory system (or nerve network). A bit is the smallest possible unit of information… a yes/no, a beat, a dot, a signal. That’s basically a tsunami of data flowing constantly into your brain. That statistic alone overwhelms mine…
Making sense of sound
As you may (or may not) know… one of the things my nervous system struggles most with at the moment is sound. For the last few years my symptoms flare massively around any kind of ‘unexpected’, mechanical, and can I say ‘emotionally loaded’ sound…that’s a funny one, it’s like I can sense the pressure in the tone of voices and it literally ‘shocks’ me, does that make sense to you? Anyways, in order to see how I can help rewire these sensations that disregulate my system so much I thought it would be helpful to understand what my brain is doing with these messages, and why they’re having such a huge impact on me.
What I didn’t know, is that sound only makes up 1% of the signals! How on earth can it be causing me so much distress, and yet be so small. 90% of the signals are visual, 8% from touch, and the rest… taste, smell and proprioception make up the rest. What I realise though is that even if sound only makes up a single thread of the sensory input, its emotional and physiological (and in my case physical) impact can be massive — especially when it hits the system by surprise. So although I realise this image is helpful for me as a building block, it’s absolutely not the ‘full’ picture at all.
Conscious Awareness
The next number that made me shudder is that of those 11 million bits of information… your conscious awareness is made up of just 50 bits per second! Now if that isn’t a tiny giant metaphor I don’t know what is… it’s like a tsunami and a teaspoon. How on earth am I expected to be able to wield any sort of power with my teaspoon when facing a tsunami?
So, as I do, I decided to try to ‘see’ what this information could show me in a way that helped me feel a little safer, and try to make a little more sense out of the data… and I turned to what I love most, zentangling and embroidery, of course. And these images are the result of taking a moment (or a second) of sensory data, that flows into my brain (my dot) of conscious awareness.
The blue threads are the sight, green for touch, red here for sound, yellow for smell and lilac for balance (taste is so super tiny that I didn’t even have a stitch for that). Each of the 100 threads represents a tiny slice of the 11 million bits coming in — a symbolic way for me to break the flood into something visual and tangible. 100 threads, each carrying 11,300 bits of information flying around my nerve network per second. And I like to think of my awareness as being the tiny ‘dot’ of processing as the threads pass through the centre of the stitching.
What about interoception?
I’m still learning more about interoception (our felt sense), thanks in large part down to the work that Kelly Mahler shares. As it is continuous and flows from inside the body, and is often below our conscious awareness, I ‘see’ it more like the web below the threads in my image. Every input, or sensation, has to pass through or interact with my web, and changes its hue somehow… If that makes sense to you?
In hindsight…
I’d have kept all the blue threads the same colour, to make the messaging clearer I think… but I do like what this final image represents to me. That although sound, and my consciousness, is so small, that I might like to play more with what I ‘see’ as a way to balance some of the weight / waves. I’m hoping that the act of creating this piece, and remembering its meaning might help to act as a grounding tool for when the next tsunami hits. I remember that Jojo (our son) used to cover his eyes when his world got too much as a child… and that always reminds me that we can actually have more agency on our senses than we think we do, when faced with the wall of overwhelm.
I wonder now what this image brings up for you, and if feels unsettling, comforting or offers you any insights?
Thanks for the beautiful illustration and explanation Bets. Speaking as the Mum who manages, despite all efforts, to emotionally trigger you, anything that helps to illuminate how you are experiencing to world will hopefully help me navigate our relationship more sensitively.
Mother and daughter relationship aside, your research in itself is fascinating and is yet another tool to understanding how we all experience the world around us.
Oh, I very much feel the same with emotional sound, Betsy!
But the smallness of it doesn’t matter, I think? It’s the fact it’s a signal which suggests danger for whatever reason; it doesn’t matter the size. You have a thousand true facts about poisonous snakes, and the 551st are “many of them are in this room right now”— the 999 others suddenly matter less