Norretranders The User Illusion Pdf
Bookmark File PDF The User Illusion Cutting Consciousness Down To Size The 'user illusion' of this groundbreaking book's title comes from the computer industry and refers to the simplistic mental image most of us have of our PCs. Our consciousness, says Norretranders, is our user illusion of ourselves. Jul 23, 2020 Contributor By: Eleanor Hibbert Publishing PDF ID 4525df00 the user illusion cutting consciousness down to size pdf Favorite eBook Reading shipping on qualified orders over 35 buy the user illusion cutting consciousness down to size at walmartcom the user illusion cutting consciousness down to size norretranders tor 123.
* In any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information our senses pass on to our brains.
* Since it takes half a second to discard those bits of information we don't use, there's a half second delay between reality and our perception of it. If a baseball player thought about swinging at a pitch, he'd never hit the ball.
* Real communication consists of the vast amount of information that's left out--what the author calls exformation--not the minuscule percentage that's left in. The User Illusion makes the case that humans are designed for a much richer existence than processing a dribble of data from a computer screen, which actually constitutes a form of sensory deprivation. In fact, there is far too little information in the so-called Information Age. Drawing on wildly disparate areas of scientific research, Tor Nrretranders makes a compelling case for putting consciousness in perspective and embracing all that the world has to offer.
Norretranders is a Danish science journalist, who attempts to tietogether the results of several scientists into an explanation of howconsciousness works. He comes at it from an information processingpoint of view, treating the human brain as a computer, while pullingin results from all over the world of science. He goes fromMaxwell-Boltzmann thermodynamics to information theory to Godel'sincompleteness theorem in the first 50 pages to give you an idea ofthe intellectual ground he covers.The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin Press Science) Norretranders, Tor on Amazon.com.FREE. shipping on qualifying offers. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin Press Science). This notion is explored by Tor Norretranders in his 1991 Danish book Mark verden, issued in a 1998 English edition as The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. He introduced the notion.
The basic premise that he puts together is that consciousness, theactual thought process where we think about what we are doing, is avery slow inefficient process. His estimate, based on severalexperiments, is that consciousness is limited to processing about 20bits/second. Compared to the chips of today which are up in thegigahertz range (billions of bits/second), it seems like a trulypaltry number. How can we reconcile this with our known ability tooutperform computers at many tasks?
Norretranders postulates that most of the work is done at asubconscious level. Nothing too surprising, there. But what wasinteresting to me was the approach he used. In his theory, the wholepoint of the subconscious parts of the brain is to reduce theinformation flow into and out of the brain down to a rate which ourfeeble 20 bits/sec consciousness can handle. He points out that weperceive about 12 million bits/second (10 million from vision, 1million from touch, and the rest scattered among the other senses).That's an enormous amount of information to process. But when we lookaround, we don't see 10 million pixels. Looking from my computerchair, I see my computer, my desk, the windows of the room, etc. Hecalls this phenomenon chunking information into symbols. To quotehim, 'symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into ourconsciousness.'
In other words, our subconscious does a truly amazing amount ofprocessing to reduce the 10 million bits we see to the 10 or soobjects we actually perceive at any one time. And since we generallyfocus in on only one object at a time, our consciousness can nowhandle the bit flow rate. This is why it takes us so much work todeal with something we have never seen before - our brain isdesperately trying to cope with the new input. It also explains a lotof what babies are doing for the first year of their life - developingthe preconscious mechanisms to handle this overwhelming onslaught ofinformation.
One example I use to illustrate this point that I thought of whilereading this book was checking your blind spot while driving intraffic. You quickly glance over your shoulder, then you lookstraight ahead again. When you looked back, there's all sorts ofthings in your vision: the rest of your car, other cars on thehighway, scenery off to the side of the highway. What yourconsciousness processes out of all that, though, is one bit - is therea car in my blind spot or not? And it takes a while to process that -there have been many times when I'll initiate a lane change, glanceover my shoulder, continue with my lane change, before myconsciousness catches up and starts screaming that there was a car inthe blind spot.
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Similarly, because of the poor information capacity of consciousness,there's an equally amazing expansion of information on the output endas there is compression on the input end. When we do an action, we donot try to control each muscle, or even each limb. We just think'Walk forward', and lower parts of the brain issues the propercommands. This is why it takes so much effort to learn a new actionin a sport - you are having to think about moving each limb in aprecise way. Later on, once your subconscious has been trained, it'sa matter of just issuing the command 'Go spike that volleyball', andyour body gauges things, jumps high in the air, and coordinates atremendously complex physical motion involving the legs, arms, andtorso to spike that ball down. It also explains the phenomenon thatall athletes have experienced - when we screw something easy up, andsay 'I had too much time to think about it' - Norretranders postulatesthat this is because the process happened slowly enough that ourconsciousness got into the loop and tried to control things.
One other interesting result of consciousness being slow is that itexplains reaction times. Any time we have to make a consciousdecision, it is going to be a slow process. However, if it is wiredinto the preconsciousness, then reaction can be instantaneous; forinstance, if we touch something very hot, we don't wait to think 'Ow!'before we move our hand - our hand flinches away, and we're dancingaway in pain even before we say 'Ow, that hurt!' A cute story fromGeorge Gamow about Niels Bohr that Norretranders includes illustratesthe same point: 'He [Bohr] developed a theory which explained why thehero is quicker and manages to kill the villain despite the fact thatthe villain is always first on the draw. ... As the hero never firesfirst, the villain has to decide when he is going to shoot, and thishampers his movements. The hero, on the other hand, acts reflexivelyand snatches his revolver quite automatically the instant he sees thevillain's hand move. We disagreed on this theory, and the next day wewent into a toy store and bought two revolvers in western holsters.We shot it out with Bohr, who played the hero. He 'killed' all hisstudents.' Norretranders would say that the villain has to involveconsciousness which is tremendously slower than the preconscious.
I haven't even gotten to Norretranders explanation of the half-seconddelay in consciousness (which I need to re-read so that I can explainit better), or exformation, or any of the other fascinating conceptsin this book. I highly recommend it obviously. It's a good read,with lots of interesting results that make you think about what howyour brain actually works.
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Eric Nehrlich's WWW home page / nehrlich@alum.mit.edu