I’m not sure I fully understand your question, but I think you’re incorrectly assuming that we can use the full input bandwidth for whatever we want to use it for, while, in reality, most of it is unconscious, and independent of our attention (whatever that is. AFAIK, there still are arguments over how to define that, and on whether you can attend to two things at the same time). You can’t, for example, close your ears and use its information processing capacity for doing programming.
https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...:
“Many researchers (being human) expected that the human brain would show a tremendous information processing capability. Interestingly enough, when researchers sought to measure information processing capabilities during “intelligent” or “conscious” activities, such as reading or piano playing, they came up with a maximum capability of less than 50 bits per second. For example, a typical reading rate of 300 words per minute works out to about 5 words per second. Assuming an average of 5 characters per word and roughly 2 bits per character yields the aforementioned rate of 50 bits per second. Clearly, the exact number depends on various assumptions and could vary depending on the individual and the task being performed. It is known, however, that the senses gather some 11 million bits per second from the environment.”
I couldn’t find where that “it is known, however” comes from.
I’m sure there’s a lot of uncertainty in those numbers, but this claims the unconscious brain processes many orders of magnitude more information than the conscious part.
They also have a split over the senses that shows how vision dominates our information processing capacity:
sensory system bits per second
eyes 10,000,000
skin 1,000,000
ears 100,000
smell 100,000
taste 1,000