What I've learned in my first week of school

Unlike a camera lens the human visual system is extremely non-uniform.

Seeing is really just a rapid (almost instantaneous) collection of visual queries.

We can really only clearly read up to eight characters at a time (per visual query).

There are approximately 100 million receptors in the eye that feed information to 10 billion neurons in the back of the brain.

It has been estimated that...

• The average human learns new unique information at a rate of 2bits/sec.
• Human memory is approximately 100Meg.
• Information in the world around us changes at the rate of 1exabyte/year.

This all leads us to the idea that the majority of information we think is in our heads is actually in the world around us. This information is retrieved with a collection of visual queries. These visual queries can be made more efficient through better information visualization.