In a way they are stating the
obvious here. Our minds are not able to digest data past a certain intuitive
level although that clearly varies. I
will take it a little farther that that.
The process of digesting date also entails properly labeling it and then
hoping the brain can do the rest.
I have had great success in
absorbing a mass of data over time on problems of interest that I chose to
carefully define. Observe the importance
of carefully defining the problem itself.
This has led to a wide range of solutions sometimes after twenty or even
fifty years.
It is thus important to inquire
after the truth, but also important to set it aside for the nonce until a
solution presents itself. Discovery
requires the gift of patience.
Brain capacity limits exponential online data growth
by Staff Writers
Scientists have found that the capacity of the human brain to process
and record information - and not economic constraints - may constitute the
dominant limiting factor for the overall growth of globally stored information.
These findings have just been published in an article in EPJ B by Claudius Gros
and colleagues from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University
Frankfurt in Germany
The authors first looked at the distribution of 633 public internet files
by plotting the number of videos, audio and image files against the size of the
files. They gathered files which were produced by humans or intended for human
use with the spider file search engine Findfiles.net.
They chose to focus on files which are hosted on domains pointing
from the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the open web directory dmoz.
Assuming that economic costs for data production are proportional to the amount
of data produced, these costs should be driving the generation of information
exponentially.
However, the authors found that, in fact, economic costs were not the
limiting factors for data production. The absence of exponential tails for the
graph representing the number of files indicates this conclusion.
They found that underlying neurophysiological processes influence the
brain's ability to handle information. For example, when a person produces an
image and attributes a subjective value to it, for example, a given resolution,
he or she is influenced by his or her perception of the quality of that image.
Their perception of the amount of information gained when increasing
the resolution of a low-quality image is substantially higher than when
increasing the resolution of a high-quality photo by the same degree. This
relation is known as the Weber-Fechner law.
The authors observed that file-size distributions obey this
Weber-Fechner law. This means that the total amount of information cannot grow
faster than our ability to digest or handle it.
Manybe the results is not too surprising, as you state, since we are indexing only public files which are either produced by humans or intended for human use.
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