Selon le Dr Andrew Newberg, un neuroscientifique qui étudie les relations entre cerveau et états mentaux, notre cerveau reçoit 400 milliards de bits d’information à la seconde sur lesquelles notre conscient n’en percevrait qu’environ 2000, soit un deux cent millionième.

Nous pouvons lire dans “What the bleep do we know ? », « Que sait-on vraiment de la réalité ?” :

Perception is a complex and many-faceted process that begins when our sensory neurons pick up information from the environment and send it, in the form of electrical impulses, to the brain. (…)

Nevertheless, the amount of information that comes pouring in from the five senses is staggering – somewhere on the order of 400 billion bits per second.

“The brain has to screen out a tremendous amount of information that is really extraneous for us. It does that by inhibiting things. It does that by certain responses and certain pieces of neural information from getting ultimately up into our consciousness, and by doing all of that, we ignore the chair that we’re sitting in. That is, screening out the known. Then there is screening out the unknown…

If we see something the brain can’t quite identify, we grab onto something similar. (“It’s not a squirrel …but it’s something just like that.”) If there is nothing close, or it’s something to not be real, we discard it with, “I must have been imagining things.””

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Cité dans “What the bleep do we know !?” Health communications Inc (page (54)