My consultation to John was very informal, one off the cuff email, but the figures are not so bizzare. They are based on the body of research, begun in the fifties, that tries to link cybernetics and information theory to human consciousness. For instance Professor Manfred Zimmermann has a chapter in Human Physiology (Springer Verlag, 1986) called Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems in which he argues that “the maximal flow of the process of conscious sensory perception is about 40 bits/sec, many orders of magnitude below that taken in by receptors….our perception then would appear to be limited to a minute part of the abundance of information available as sensory input.”

That’s one of the more recent estimates Im aware of, don’t know where research is at today. But the figures from the fifties onwards always come out much the same, consciousness processing/perception as being limited to somewhere between 7 and 40 bits. The best summary of the research I have come across is in the The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders (Penguin 1998) in his chapter The Bandwith of Consciousness, where the above quote comes from.

You could argue that the assignment of bits per sec rates to consciousness and unconscious processes (esepcially the latter) is essentially arbitrary, but not to the extent that I made up the figures! I was just passing on existing research.

Hope that clarifies