How to totally consume bandwidth?

How much bandwidth does each human sense consume relatively speaking?

• Bandwidth here means, for example, "how much information is received per second". See related:

• Answer:

  As a software engineer, when we talk about bandwidth we talk about the number of bits per second that have to be transmitted in order to convey the information from one place to another.  The way I interpret the question would be something like "If you had a remote control android with full human senses, how much bandwidth would it take to transmit those senses to the person controlling it?  I'll answer it from that perspective. First, some ground rules. 1. No compression. That's something that would be worked out eventually, but you can't effectively specify compression without actually knowing the form of the data. 2. Bandwidth size that leaves the sensory organs. There are a LOT of ways that our body converts information in the brain and we don't understand half of it yet. There is apparently even a translation layer directly behind the cones and rods in our eyes. We'll count that, but not the parts in your brain that decide what you're looking at. In a lot of those cases we're actually discarding a lot of information, making it a "lossy" form of compression. 3. We're going to go with averages here. There are variations, but let's say you're trying to figure out minimum requirements for working with most people. 4. This information will need to grow over time because the full set will require considerable input from experts in various fields. Each sense will likely have to be calculated separately. Vision This is a pretty simple one. University of Pennsylvania calculated the bandwidth at 8.96 Mb/s. They know more than me about this, so I'm going to just run with that number. Current Biology (vol 16, p 1428) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9633-calculating-the-speed-of-sight Beyond vision, we don't actually get a continual transfer speed. Impulses per second when you're eating something jump for your mouth and nose, and being burned alive is a good way to stimulate all of your touch sensors at once. If you multiply the number of neurons in the pathway by the maximum firing speed then what you wind up with is the absolute maximum throughput of the channel. This throughput can actually be increased by varying the timing between pulses on two separate neuron, so even that isn't an absolute theoretical upper limit, but it's a good indicator of what level of throughput would result in seisures if you tried it. Hearing The cochlear nerve bundle has around 30,000 fibers. Given the typical firing rate of neurons to be around 1000x per second, this puts a maximum transfer rate of 30Mb/s. However, much research has been done into determining how much bandwidth would be required to transmit the most complex sound that the human ear can hear. Hearing occurs in the range of roughly 20Hz to 20kHz. This can be divided into what's called "critical bands", where we will only hear the loudest sound that falls within that band. The total count of these bands can be found in the document Critical Bandwidth and the Frequency Coordinates of the Basilar Membrane (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 33, Issue 10, pp. 1344-1356 (1961)) "http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v33/i10/p1344_s1?isAuthorized=no", but I don't have access to that journal. Now to figure out how many bits per second are transmitted for each band... (ran out of research time for now, answer incomplete) Touch If the sensory nerves were evenly distributed over the whole body, each square inch (6.5 square cm) of skin would have about 50 heat receptors, 8 for cold, 100 for touch, and 800 for pain. [Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition].  We're talking about 2700 square inches (average with around 1000 nerve endings each, which have an optimal sensation impulse speed of around 50 pulses per second. This translates to around 135mb/s for a severely over-exposed individual who happens to be on fire while taking a ride in a cement mixer. In any rational transmission scheme, this would be limited to just the sensations that exceeded a threshold for each type within an area. Smell Contributed by : Information on smell seems to be passed along by 100,000 neurons: ''In man, the olfactory nerve is short, merely perforating the cribriform plate into the brain cavity and terminating in the olfactory bulb. Olfactory nerve fibers converge onto mitral cells in the bulb, which send their axons (about 100,000 of them) in the olfactory tract to  the piriform cortex, the periamygdaloid area, and the olfactory tubercle.'' Source: http://www.unmc.edu/physiology/M... Taste Roughly 10k taste buds per person, average of ten nerve endings per taste bud. The seem to have a realtively slow firing speed of around ten pulses per second, apparently because the ten endings have to come to some sort of consensus before passing the information along. I think we can call this 100kb/sec without compression. Balance Proprioception