THE USER ILLUSION
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

Tor Norretranders

Viking, 1998

The 'user illusion' in computing is the desktop graphical user interface (GUI): the friendly, comprehensible illusion presented to the user to conceal all the bouncing bits and bytes that do the actual work. Tor Norretranders writes that 'our consciousness is a user illusion for ourselves and the world ... one's very own map of oneself and one's possibilities of intervening in the world.' The illusion of how we think our minds work has little to do with what research tells us. In any second, our senses process some 11 million bits of information, but consciousness processes only about 16 bits. Intuition and the unconscious process far more than is available to the conscious mind. Evoked potentials show evidence of decisions and ideas about a half second before we are aware of them. Our conscious construction of reality is mostly a delayed assemblage of bits of information in the process of being discarded. This book examines more than a century of psychological, information processing, and physical research relevant to consciousness.