From kragen@dnaco.net Mon Aug 31 09:57:53 1998 Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 09:57:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: fractint@lists.xmission.com Subject: Re: (fractint) Fractal risks? In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980831223420.00903170@nznet.gen.nz> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1597 Status: O X-Status: On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Morgan L. Owens wrote: > up looking derivative. But as well as "seeing" stuff in a fractal, I > took on the fact that our eyes are by far the widest-bandwidth channel > for getting information into the brain (the retinas themselves > qualifying as exposed bits of the brain) - something like 150Gb/s raw > data rate - I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using the assumption that the whole eye had resolution equivalent to the fovea's, and came up with a rough guess of 10Gb/s. Of course, the foveae actually have much, much better resolution than the rest of the eye, so the truth is probably only a few hundred kbps. Our ears can hear at something like 80kbps. Our skin might be another matter entirely -- its time resolution is decent, perhaps 100-200Hz, much better than that of our eyes (you can tap rhythm accurately by touch and kinesthetic sensation), it's pretty big (several square yards, or several thousand square inches), has good spatial resolution in a few places, but generally not, and has fairly good sampling depth (six bits at least, with several channels). So it may be that our skin has a gigabit or two of bandwidth. Taste is probably not a high-bandwidth sense. Smell, I don't know. It probably doesn't have great time resolution (4 Hz at most, I think) and almost no spatial resolution (left nostril or right, and most of us can't even tell the difference) but it has a huge number of channels -- but whether they are hundreds or millions I am not sure. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web