28 • FLOW
The intentions we either inherit or acquire are organized m hierar
chies of goals, which specify the order of precedence among them. For
the protester, achieving a given political reform may be more important
than anything else, life included. That one goal takes precedence over
all others. Most people, however, adopt “sensible” goals based on the
needs of their body—to live a long and healthy life, to have sex, to be
well fed and comfortable—or on the desires implanted by the social
system—to be good, to work hard, to spend as much as possible, to live
up to others’ expectations. But there are enough exceptions in every
culture to show that goals are quite flexible. Individuals who depart from
the norms—heroes, saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as madmen
and criminals—look for different things in life than most others do. The
existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered
in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom
to control our subjective reality.
THE LIMITS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
If it were possible to expand indefinitely what consciousness is able to
encompass, one of the most fundamental dreams of humankind would
come true. It would be almost as good as being immortal or omnipo
tent—in short, godlike. We could think everything, feel everything, do
everything, scan through so much information that we could fill up
every fraction of a second with a rich tapestry of experiences. In the
space of a lifetime we could go through a million, or—why not?—
through an infinite number of lives.
Unfortunately, the nervous system has definite limits on how
much information it can process at any given time. There are just so
many “events” that can appear in consciousness and be recognized and
handled appropriately before they begin to crowd each other out. Walk
ing across a room while chewing gum at the same time is not too difficult,
even though some statesmen have been alleged to be unable to do it;
but, in fact, there is not that much more that can be done concurrently.
Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are
thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness
or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simulta
neously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capac
ity for attention.
At this point in our scientific knowledge we are on the verge of
being able to estimate how much information the central nervous system
is capable of processing. It seems we can manage at most seven bits of