The User Illusion:
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
by Tor Nørretranders

This delicious book makes the case for a limit to the conscious bit rate of around 16 bits per second, but asserts that we have a very much larger subconscious human interface capacity. It is an attractive reasonable idea but one for which I personally have seen no hard evidence. However I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in these matters.

In the book Tor notes various published estimates of information rate from Karl Küpfmüller (1897 – 1977):

Conscious Processing of Information
Activity		Bits/Sec
Silent Reading	45
Reading Aloud	30
Proofreading	18
Typewriting	16
Piano Playing	23
Multiplying and adding two numbers	12
Counting objects	3

"All the instances in the human organism that take part in processing messages seem to be designed to the upper limit of 50 bits/sec" Karl Küpfmüller

The Bell Labs Communications Engineer John R Pierce in his book "Symbols Signals and Noise" estimated a maximum rate of 44 Bits per second

The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nørretranders

The User Illusion:
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
by Tor Nørretranders