Separately but related: decades ago, research was done into the "Bandwidth of Consciousness", that is: how much information can we consciously process. That research came up with the startling low number of about 40 bits per second _at_most_. Suggesting that the huge amount of information our senses take in is massively compressed before we become 'conscious' of it.

References:

W R Garner and Harold W Lake "The Amount of Information in Absolute Judgements" - Psychological Review 58 (1951) - they attempted to measure people's ability to distinguish stimuli (such as light and sound) in bits. Result: 2.2 to 3.2 bits per second.

W E Hick "On the Rate of Gain of Information" - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 4 (1952) - this experiment measured how much information a person could pass on if they acted as a link in a communication channel. That is, faced with a series of flashing lights, subjects had to press the right keys. Result: 5.5 bits per second.

Henry Quastler "Studies of Human Channel Capacity" - Information Theory, Proceedings of the Third London Symposium (1956). Measured how many bits of information are expressed by a pianist while pressing keys on a piano. Result: 25 bits per second.

J R Pierce "Symbols, Signals and Noise" (Harper 1961) - used experiments involving letters and symbols. Result: 44 bits per second.

Mostly they are measuring bandwidth as being 'what can someone take in and then act on' and probably the 'acting on' bit is the bottleneck. I think this is an area of research that could do with being revisited, perhaps someone could devise a way of measuring bandwidth-in to consciousness vs bandwidth-out.