Nir Eyal

11 million bits.

That's about the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice.

It's a tremendous amount of information.

What does that information look like?

It's the light entering your eyes.

It's the sound of my voice entering your ears.

It's the ambient temperature of the room.

Your brain is processing all that information.

You're just not conscious of it because...

Your conscious awareness can only process about 50 bits of information, okay?

50 bits versus 11 million bits.

That means you are aware of only .000045% of the information available to you.

So because the brain just can't handle all this information,

It has to do something about it to help us function in a world where we have so much information entering our brains.

It takes a shortcut.

And that shortcut is to leverage our beliefs.

So we see reality not as it is.

We see it through this tiny keyhole of attention that is dictated by our beliefs.

And that keyhole of attention determines what we can even see as possible, not only in present reality, but also in the future.

I'll give you an example.