Retina communicates to brain at 10 million bits per second: Implications for evidence displays?

In all my books, one of the key arguments revolves around the routinely spectacular resolution of the human eye-brain system, which then in turn leads to the idea that our displays of evidence should be worthy of human eye-brain system. This is, for example, the conclusion of sparkline analysis in Beautiful Evidence, where the idea is to make our data graphics at least operate at the resolution of good typography (say 2400 dpi).

Here is a link to a press-release summary account of an article in Current Biology (July 2006) by Judith McLean and Michael A. Freed, from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Ronen Segev and Michael J. Berry III, from Princeton University. The research suggests that the human retina transmits data to the brain at the rate of 10 million bits per second, which is close to an Ethernet connection!

Looking around the world is easier than analyzing evidence displays, and there may also be within-brain impediments to handling vast amounts of abstract data, but at least the narrow-band choke point for information resolution should not be the display itself.

The average PP slide contains 40 words, which take less 10 seconds to read. Call that 1000 bits per second, which comes to 1/10,000 of the routine human retina-brain data capacity.

Also most of our evidence displays are in flatland, which is a easier than 3D perceptual tasks. On the other hand, many serious data displays are not in the familiar 4D space/time coordinate system that our eye-brain knows so well.

Memory problems can be partly handled by high-resolution displays, so that key comparisons are made adjacent in space within the common eyespan. Spatial adjacency greatly reduces the memory problems associated with making comparisons of small amounts of information stacked in time (PP slides, for example).