100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

12. Memory Takes a Lot of Mental Resources

The latest research on unconscious mental processing shows that people receive 40 billion sensory inputs every second. Doesn’t this mean that they can deal with more than four things at a time? Yes, but the difference is that they can only consciously deal with four at a time. When they perceive a sensory input (for example, a sound, the feel of the wind on their skin, a rock in their visual field), they perceive that something exists and is still there. They don’t have to remember it. They can continue to receive sensory input about it. But to process information consciously, they have to think about it and remember it. They have to be able to represent it and encode it in their brains. And that takes ...