100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, 2nd Edition

23 Memory Takes a Lot of Mental Resources

The latest research on unconscious mental processing shows that people receive 40 billion sensory inputs every second and are consciously aware of 40 at any one time. Doesn’t this mean that we can deal with and remember more than four things at a time? When you perceive a sensory input (for example, a sound, the feel of the wind on your skin, a rock that is in front of you), you perceive that something exists. You don’t necessarily have to remember it or do something with the information. Conscious awareness of 40 things is different than consciously processing 40 bits of information. It takes a lot of mental resources to think about, remember, process, represent, and encode information.

Memory is Easily ...