Stimulus

How we live is governed largely by the stimulus around us. Today, we dive deeply into the concept of stimuli around us, how it impacts flora, and whether there is something deeply concerning about it.

Life can be overwhelming and magnificent — therein is all its tragedy. Without beauty, love and danger, it would be almost easy to live.

– Albert Camus

I’m sure almost everyone had their first encounter with the word “stimulus” in science class. For me, I remember my first encounter with the word in context of plants. Remember the “touch me not” plant? It is a plant that converges all leaves inwards as soon as something comes near it.

This was not, however, the only member of the plant kingdom to exhibit features like these. Other plants, like the sunflower, turn their faces towards sunlight or the Venus flytrap, which despite being a plant, was carnivorous in nature intrigued my interest.

There are a number of other ways that plants respond to stimuli. There is phototropism, where a plant grows towards sunlight. Then there is geotropism, where the plant grows towards gravity. There is even chemotropism, where a plant grows towards a specific chemical or hormone.

While we understand the plants are living beings, we don’t necessarily acknowledge them to be living in every moment, until some of them respond to stimulus provided my us. The obvious reason is that we see feedback in the form of movement or repulsion shown to our touch. (pluck a nerve, did I?)

Isn’t it captivating how different plants respond to different kinds of stimuli, and how the stimulus impacts their growth, and rest of their lives? This led me to curiosity as to how various stimuli might impact human behaviour, and do we have the same, lasting signs to show for to these stimuli?

Breaking Down Natural Stimuli

In my research, my study again began in elementary science classes, where we are taught about the sense organs in the human body, which breaks down the available external stimuli into five categories.

1. Visual stimuli: What we see. Stimulus received by the eyes.
2. Auditory stimuli: What we hear. Stimulus received by the ears.
3. Olfactory stimuli: What we smell. Received by the nose.
4. Gustatory stimuli: What we taste. Received by the tongue.
5. Cutaneous stimuli: What we touch. Received by the skin.

All these stimuli feed into our brain, which acts as the processing engine. As I said earlier, these are only the external stimuli that we have. There are a number of internal stimuli that exist within the human body as well. These include movement of hormones and brain signals that trigger things like hunger, thirst & emotional stress.

As my research advanced, I came across some really interesting findings. According to an article on NPR, the human brain receives 11 million (yes, million) bits of information every second (yes, every second).

Want to hear another staggering statistic? or all the multitasking pros out there. The brain is only capable of processing 40-50 bits every second. For context, the brain processes 0.00003% of the total bits received by the brain.

We can safely conclude that our brains are severely overstimulated as it is. And so far, I have only talked about how we receive and process natural information. Now I am going to the more terrifying part.

The Digital Stimuli

Lets talk about all the forms of stimuli we put ourselves through today. We consume content in numerous forms. There is the written word (if you like this form, you might like to read more. Find more of such content here). Then there is audio, consisting of music, podcasts, what have you.

But it has predominantly become a short video market (Prefer this form? View more content of the form here).

Reels, TikToks and YouTube shorts are the name of the game today. We don’t even count the number of videos we view daily, and consumption goes by the hour. Numbers are the easiest to set context, hence why I have been talking in bits of information so far. Therefore, I’ll use the same unit here as well.

The amount of information packed in a 30-second short video, for assumption sake, will depend largely on the bitrate, resolution, compression, audio and many other factors. Taking certain assumptions, the amount comes out to be approximately 451,737,600 bits.

So every 30-second video we view, we add 451,737,600 bits to the 11 million we naturally process. See, I wasn’t kidding when I said staggering.

Conclusion

One thing we can conclude pretty safely from this information is

We live in a grossly overstimulating world. Being mindful of what we consume, therefore, should be top priority for everyone.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂