From: hughes@maelstrom.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Hughes) Subject: Re: Sensory Modalities (was Re: Musical Virtual Worlds) Date: 3 Dec 90 13:58:40 Message-ID: Organization: ucb In article <12146@milton.u.washington.edu> cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes: >The bandwidth of the optic nerve has been estimated at 1 Mb/s >[... etc.] So by any quantitative standard, vision has greater >bandwidth than sound. >If sound had a greater bandwidth than vision, we'd all have >headphones on our computers instead of monitors. [...] But if you >want to start comparing the two quantitatively, you'd better talk in >quantitative terms. There are two different meanings of the the word information here. The first is information in the sense of the entropy of a communications channel. The second is the original sense, namely, that which informs a persons or that which a person learns or that knowledge which a person acquires. The first is measurable; the second is not. It is certainly true that the bandwidth of a communications channel required to simulate a visual sensorium is larger than that to simulate an aural sensorium. What was being discussed, however, was information in the second sense. Per unit time, does audible or visible sense data provide more information? The answer to this question is not at all obvious to me. A linguistics friend once told me about some experiments done with blind children, who equipped with a certain sound source, developed echo-location ability. In some cases the ability was retained even after the sound source was no longer in use. Unfortunately I have no references of any sort, i.e. take with a grain of salt. Eric Hughes hughes@ocf.berkeley.edu