I have just begun my very close reading of Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking. I will be doing annotation in the margins, a physical reading of a paper copy of the book, as well as Kindle highlight/annotations.  Already I am struck favorably by the metaphors Gray uses.  For example, he compares our attention spans to the needle on a record player.  His point is that attention is way more narrow than we think.

He cites Manfred Zimmerman‘s work in the mid-eighties with measuring maximum human sensory capacity. Our senses could theoretically take in 11,000,000 bits per second (bps).  Of course, they don’t.  Maximum throughput may work when you are talking about a USB cable, but doesn’t make much sense with optic nerves. Why? Because the capacity, the wetware, isn’t constrained in the same way a machine or a part is .

This same researcher indicated that our actual capacity is only 40 bps. That is about .0004% of max.  Hence Gray’s record needle.  We bump along in our own record grooves taking in what seems an infinitesimal amount of info.  Our experience of the world is based upon this impossibly thin slice of baloney.  Great.

There are problems with Zimmerman’s research. I advise you to look at the earlier link, but Gray’s metaphor holds, I believe.  I am working my way through each of his exercises and have found that all of them help me come up with new insights.