Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code, understood that certain letters in the English language occurred more frequently than others (Gallistel and King 2010). To deal with this, Morse used one dot to represent the most frequently occurring letter in the language, the letter ‘E’, and he used multiple symbols [two dashes followed by two dots] to represent the least frequently occurring letter in the language, the letter ‘Z’. When Shannon was developing his communication theory, he along with Fano was able to compress the information transmitted by having the most frequently occurring words requiring fewer bits than the least frequently occurring words. This became known as Shannon-Fano Coding.
How does the brain go about compressing information? In patients who had their vision restored later in life after missing out on the critical period of development, when presented with a visual image they are unable to resolve a collage of colors and shades to make sense of the world, even though their retinal receptors are intact (Fine et al. 2003; Gregory 2003; Gregory and Wallace 2001; Kurson 2007). The ability to discriminate visually only comes about if the temporal cortices are made functional through learning, which allows one to resolve and identify visual objects, an attribute of all mammals (Bruce et al. 1981; Fine et al. 2003; Froudarakis et al. 2019).
In the laboratory of Peter Schiller, there was the idea that the brain does not have the capacity to store all images that are out there. This thinking is flawed. When was the last time you were challenged to memorize all the images out there? It is the process of learning that hones the selection of items so that what is stored is based on utility, i.e., the most frequently occurring items experienced are stored. This means that the information contained in Einstein’s brain is very different from the information contained in Pelé’s brain, but of course both implement similar routines for drinking, eating, fornicating, and so on. Einstein would not do too well on the pitch against Pelé, nor would Pelé do too well on the pitch of physics against Einstein. In short, learning is what allows the brains of animals to be efficient about information storage, thereby implementing a type of Shannon-Fano Coding. And contrary to the advocates of the hard problem, there is no such problem since every human being (including identical twins) is configured differently. Thus, being preoccupied with the hard problem means that you don’t understand biology (e.g., Chalmers 1995, 1997; Koch and Chalmer 2023).
Biological information compression in the brain is a complex process involving electrochemical interactions between neurons, synaptic modifications in response to experiences, multiple methods of information encoding, and filtering out unnecessary information. These processes work together to achieve efficient information processing and storage with high energy efficiency.
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