186 Billion Bits.
Life is finite. You are born. You will die.
In-between those two events, some time passes. For any amount of time, there is a specific limit on how much information your nervous system can process.
Our consciousness can only register a limited number of events. Studies show that we can process around 7 pieces of information simultaneously. It takes roughly 1/18th of a second to distinguish between one set of bits and another.
This gives us a maximum yield of 126 bits of information processing per second.
Let’s put this into perspective. There are 8 bits of information in 1 byte and 1024 bytes in a KB.
So, 1KB is 8,192 bites.
A page of plain text is approximately 2KBs, or 16,384 bits of information, or approximately 130 seconds worth of information processing.
186 billion bites are how much information processing is available in a 70-year life, assuming 16 hours of waking time each day.
That’s 11,352,539 pages of plain text.
That is the sum of your consciousness — every feeling, emotion, memory, and word.
However, we are not always fully conscious; we spend much of our lives on autopilot, not mindful of how we spend our time.
Consider the fact that every moment is just that, a moment.
Then it’s gone.
