>Hearing is also well into the terabytes worth of information per year.
If we assume that the human auditory system is equivalent to uncompressed digital recording, sure. Actual neural coding is much more efficient, so the amount of data that is meaningfully processed after multiple stages of filtering and compression is plausibly on the order of tens of gigabytes per year; the amount actually retained is plausibly in the tens of megabytes.
Don't get me wrong, the human brain is hugely impressive, but we're heavily reliant on very lossy sensory mechanisms. A few rounds of Kim's Game will powerfully reveal just how much of what we perceive is instantly discarded, even when we're paying close attention.
The sensory information form individual hairs in the ear start off with a lot more data to process than simple digital encoding of two audio streams.
Neural encoding isn’t particularly efficient from a pure data standpoint just an energy standpoint. A given neuron not firing is information and those nerve bundles contain a lot of neurons.
If we assume that the human auditory system is equivalent to uncompressed digital recording, sure. Actual neural coding is much more efficient, so the amount of data that is meaningfully processed after multiple stages of filtering and compression is plausibly on the order of tens of gigabytes per year; the amount actually retained is plausibly in the tens of megabytes.
Don't get me wrong, the human brain is hugely impressive, but we're heavily reliant on very lossy sensory mechanisms. A few rounds of Kim's Game will powerfully reveal just how much of what we perceive is instantly discarded, even when we're paying close attention.