How much can we ever know?
Total information taken in = Maximum learning rate x Total of all learning time
- Assuming the Maximum rate is 20 bits per second.
- For example 8 hours per day for 90 years is 946,080,000 seconds of learning
= around 19 Gigabits of information, which is 2.4 Gigabytes (8 bits per byte).
This is significantly less than the information capacity of a DVD!
But even this is optimistic, as we only take in information for a small part of the time. We spend a significant time in introspection, reflecting on what we already know, listening to familiar music and gazing at familiar TV.
