Wasted Bandwidth

The mind has a lot of unused bandwidth. If I remember correctly, it was Bill Gates who made that comment. Everyday as we go about our daily lives, we inadvertently allow plenty of blank spaces to pass through our field of vision - unadorned walls, blandly carpeted walkways, white ceilings - in between focussing our attention on things that we are really interested in. These are unused bandwidth. Wasted information real-estate.

Imagine if you have a KL map on the wall in front of your desk. As you go about doing your everyday tasks, inevitably your eyes would have scanned the information on the map into your brains hundreds or thousands of times. And subconsciously, they do register. Who knows, the next time you get stuck in a traffic jam in the city, your brain might suddenly come up with an alternate route unknown to you before.

We also absorb information that we do not even consciously see or hear. The advertising people are experts on this so-called subliminal messaging. In a movie theatre, one out of the 24 frames projected on the screen per second could contain advertisements or other types of messages and we would never even know it. Some religious groups also claim that certain rock bands inject subliminal Satanic worship messages backmasked into their songs. Samples of this are abound on the Internet.

On the more positive side, there's a whole industry of self-improvement products based on subliminal messaging. These range from simple relaxation tapes with gamelan music mixed with humpback whale songs, to nature sounds filled with the humming of tropical insects and the pelting of raindrops to synthesized music that is supposed to stimulate your chakras to French language lessons for sleep-learning.

I have a fondness for maps and I enjoy looking at them. When I was living and working in Singapore I used to have a large map of Jakarta city pasted on the wall of my bedroom. I ended up living in Jakarta.

Thinking back, had I known it would work so well I would have put up a poster of Sophia Latjuba instead.