Bryan Hackney wrote:
>StpNrrs at aol.com wrote:
> > robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> >
> >>in article 1130629424.117822.102680 at f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
> >>maestro at ultrapiano.com at StpNrrs at aol.com wrote on 10/29/2005 19:43:
> >>
> >>
> [...]
> >
> > "this known neural bottleneck". Do you mean the disparity in the
> > amount of information that the ear sends the brain, at most a few
> > thousand haircells firing ten times per second, compared to the
> > 44100*16 bits per second required for high-fidelity digital audio
> > sound? The same 'known neural bottleneck' occurs in the eyes - about
> > 1000000*3*25 bits per second when your're looking at your computer
> > monitor.
> >
>> Try this. Fill your monitor with approximately 8 point text, and see how
> much you can read with your peripheral vision. Not much, eh?
I was being ironic...
In fact I agree with you, there is obviously hardly any information
going from the eyes and ears into the brain, compared with the number
of bits/sec of digital sound and video.
"robert bristow-johnson" seems to think that the auditory nerves are
rather like internet broadband connections into the inner brain, and
claims that this must cause an information bottleneck. He proposes the
theory that the ears discard so much information from the original
audio signal that the resultant input into the brain is very lossy and
therefore noisy, and claims that the inner brain is using
noise-reduction techniques on this input to produce the perception of
hi-fi audio. The idea is basically nonsense, and I pointed out that
the same situation is 1000s of times worse for the optical system, and
therefore unworkable (as you also realise).
It is misleading to think that a sound 'is' the 41000 16-bit samples
per second of digital audio (and that visual information 'is' the
1000000 RGB pixels at 25 frames per second of digital video). The
sense of sound occurs in the brain - if a tree falls in a forest, it
causes pressure variations in the air but it does not itself make the
sound.
The ears sense variations in air-pressure, and when the brain
recognises features and patterns in that information, it can identify a
sound as similar to something it has heard before. The vast amount of
understanding of sounds stored in the brain's memory is gained from a
lifetime's experience of hearing, and compensates for the apparently
'low quality signal' that the ears give the brain.
