Humans tend to tie up our "processor time" as it might be called by thinking and using reason. We rely on reason more than our senses to get us what we want. Hence, our sensory ability suffers. We don't have the feeling ability of a cockroach, which I've heard can feel movements measured in refrence to the size of a molecule...we don't have the hearing of bats or dolphins, offering us a broad frequency spectrum and a brain with such excellent perception of hearing that we can echolocate (though I've heard that some people can do this with practice)...we don't have eyesight that can detect the slightest movement, or that can detect infrared or ultraviolet...we don't have a sense of smell that can detect a drop of a substance from half a mile away like a shark...we don't rely on our senses as much, so our southbridge is slow as fuck, but our northbridge and backside bus puts other animals to shame. But that means that while we can do amazing things once the information is in our heads, we have trouble getting it there quickly. This is why we "expand" and "compress" the data it with things like contractions, pictographs, drawings, et cetera, why we pick out only the important features of something and then fill in the missing data in our minds. That's why dolphins can have more bandwidth than humans for specific communication.

If you've ever zoomed in like crazy at a speech file's wave pattern, you can see the wave shapes and with practice, identify which pattern goes to which sound. But you notice, that in the sound files, the wave is repeated dozens or hundreds of times. Our brains are too focused on the inside to pick up what's going on outside the first time. Theoretically, without changing the language, you could cut out all the wave repetitions in a speech and leave only one wave for each sound, and all the necessary data of the speech would be retained. But if you played it back, you wouldn't understand it. We can understand something like 20 wave pattern changes per second before things start getting jumbled up in our head. At 400hz, and one wave per sound, that would be 400 wave pattern changes per second. All the information is present, but it's coming at us faster than our southbridge will move it. In order to keep it understandable, we have to be redundant with the sound. We have to repeat the sound wave pattern dozens of times at least, to ensure that it gets understood at all.

To compensate for the expansion necessary, we usually compress information also. I'm sure you've seen the paragraph where all the words were mixed up except for the first and last letters of each word, but it was still understandable? We compress information that we're reading by leaving out irrelevant information. If I write the word "READ" you don't need to look at each letter and determine what letter it is to figure out what I'm saying (unless you're very new to reading). You can just look at the center of the word and tell what word it is, ignoring some of the more specific features. You can look at a word like "INTELLIGENT" and you can see what word it is without taking in all the information necessary to be sure what word it is. When I look at the word intelligent I look at the first 5 letters, see how much longer the word is, and I move on to the next word assuming "intelligent" unless I read something inconsistent with that later on.

We could theoretically find the point at which "processor time" spent on reading the input data is at an equilibrium with what we spend refining the data and interpreting the data, and reach an optimum bandwidth like that. But each person is different...some people have better eyesight, better feeling, better hearing, or shitty every sense but extremely quick with their mind. So we kinda have to use the lowest common denominator on both the input and compression halves to ensure reliable reception, making the exercise of looking for an equilibrium pointless.

Humans are extremely adaptive though. Some people are capable of some kind of echolocation. Some people have learned to see as sharply underwater as they see above water. Blind people train their other senses to compensate for their lack of vision. I've seen someone that was so skillful at speedreading that he could read 100,000 words per minute. If we consider the average letter to be 8-bit and the average word to be five characters (4 letters plus space), that's 4,000,000 bits per second...or, 4 megabits per second. Verizon was offering 5 megabits per second fiber optic internet where I used to live. And keep in mind, a cable internet connection only has to tell a 1 from a 0, while he had to tell an A from a B from a C from a D. But it's only good for recorded information that can be displayed quickly. Nobody can write or type fast enough to keep up with him.

I don't know if I have any kind of coherent message to this post...I guess it's just a lot of neat stuff to think about.