The "data rate" of consciousness is quite slow. I would have to dig in my library to find my books, but I recall one by a chap named Walker, who was a physics teacher at the same college Robert Anton Wilson taught. I think his book was called The Physics of Consciousness, but would have to check to make sure. He calculated the data rate of consciousness and it came out much slower than we would suspect. He said no one believed him, but experiments much later proved he was not far off. One of his conclusions was that when we're driving a car at 65 MPH, we're actually 12 feet further along than we "think" we are.
One experiment was pretty much common sense and demonstrated a quality of the human mind that I found fascinating. The time for nerve impulses to travel the length of the human body to the brain and back again is pretty slow. People were stuck in the big toe with pins and of course, they registered pain, yelped, and pulled their foot away. They said the pain sensation was simultaneous to the pin prick. But when they were blindfolded, there was a noticeable delay between the pinprick and the yell-and-recoil. So the conclusion was the person's mind was editing reality to make sense of it, in other words, correlating the visual input with the input of the nerves!
Other studies indicated our minds do this quite often, dropping out points of time here and there to make senses of the different "lags" in out various sensory inputs so everything correlates. Otherwise, we would walk around with various conflicting signals due to the inefficient nature of our sense-organs. So there are "gaps" in reality we simply do not remember. Therefore, if this research is valid, it is not possible even on a coarse level for our minds to process all sense-data simultaneously, not to mention on the near-microscopic citta-level described by the abhidhamma.
There is also a phenomenon called selective amnesia, often experienced by people texting or talking on the cell phone wile driving. You actually
do not see some things while involved in multitasking complicated procedures, your brain edits them out. Driving simulations demonstrate this. I've also recreated this in my hypnosis demonstrations. I tell the subjects the hypnotist is invisible, but anything I'm holding is visible. Their eyes do not register me, but will dilate when I bring the objects into view. Eye dilation is controlled partially by autonomous and autonomous systems so I find this fascinating. The mind can truly edit reality.
So I have reason to believe the "serial processing" model of citta presented by the Theravada abhidhamma has some validity to it.
Oh yeah--it's also a lot more complex than just the six sense cittas, there are other cittas that precede the sense cittas, follow them when they pass away, and there's also the bvangha-citta which conditions everything.
I hope this helps cast some light on the subject from another point of view. If not, ignore .
J
