Psionics | The Magic of Consciousness

What is the magic of consciousness; of memory, of coding and recoding, to make the data within personal, relevant, and useful?  A goal of life is survival and the more useful the data is to the consciousness the better the…

What is the magic of consciousness; of memory, of coding and recoding, to make the data within personal, relevant, and useful?  A goal of life is survival and the more useful the data is to the consciousness the better the entity is able to survive and then thrive.

Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
~ Read this but do not fear it. ~

According to the Channel Capacity equation, C = B log(1 + S/N), C-capacity, B-bandwidth of channel, S-signal power, N-noise power;

When B the bandwidth moves towards infinity, capacity saturates to 1.44S/N. When there is more noise power the capacity for acquiring storing coding and encoding information diminishes. The system is unable to function effectively.

Linguistic Meaning: I hear some things, I can’t remember and I can not use to make my life better.

We will come back to this formula in the conclusion.

The Introduction

The span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence or chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.

In addition, the process of coding and then recoding into language system that then can be quickly assessed and then used is a very important one in human psychology and deserves much more explicit attention than it has received. In particular, the kind of linguistic recoding that people do seems to me to be the very lifeblood of the thought processes. The coding has been of most importance to a variety of scientist because it is the shared experience that is viewed. In university studies, the information that will give the student the desired grade, in sports the events that lead up to the scoring of the points, in politics the demagogue who shares his propaganda with the his supporters. The message (coding) is the same and yet when it is processed by the mind it is recoded into information that is personal, and meaningful to the individual.

The recoding procedures are a constant concern to clinicians, social psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists and yet, probably because recoding is less accessible to experimental manipulation than nonsense syllables or T mazes, the traditional experimental psychologist has contributed little or nothing to their analysis. Nevertheless, experimental techniques can be used, methods of recoding can be specified, behavioral indicants can be found. And one can anticipate that we will find a very orderly set of relations describing what now seems an uncharted wilderness of individual differences.

Finally, the concepts and measures provided by the theory of information provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions. The theory provides us with a yardstick for calibrating our stimulus materials (that which moves and motivates us) and for measuring the performance of our subjects. In the following article, the technical details of information measurement will express the ideas in more familiar terms.

In truth, this should not lead one to think the terms are not useful in research. Informational concepts are proved valuable in the study of discrimination and of language; and they promise a great deal in the study of learning and memory as it has even been proposed that they can be useful in the study of concept formation. Concept formation is an abstract idea leading to an intention or a plan that creates the ability to either imagine or creates understanding.

A lot of questions that seemed fruitless twenty or thirty years ago may now be worth another look. In fact, what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? For the present I propose to withhold judgment. Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But it is suspected that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence… or if it?

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