The User Illusion

The User Illusion, published in Danish in 1991 as Mærk verden and in English in 1998 with the subtitle Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, is the Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders's synthesis of information theory, thermodynamics and psychology around a single claim about consciousness. The claim is that the senses take in information at a rate vastly greater than the rate at which conscious awareness operates, so that almost everything is discarded before a person is aware of anything, and consciousness is therefore best understood as a simplified interface to a world it does not directly observe, in the way a computer desktop is an interface to operations it does not display. Nørretranders builds the argument from Shannon's information theory, from work on the bandwidth of the senses, and from Benjamin Libet's experiments on the timing of awareness relative to action. The bandwidth figures widely quoted from this book originate in earlier estimates by Manfred Zimmermann, and the book is a popular synthesis rather than a primary source for any of them.

Written from the public record for the book.

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