In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores the five sense organs and how they provide us with a limited perception of reality.

Our sense organs are designed to provide us with an image of reality that is actually very far from whatever actual reality may be. I am inspired to discuss this because I am speaking to you from the beautiful island of Maui in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Behind me is the wide Pacific Ocean, which is currently peaceful, although it is not always so.

We have the five great elements, the Pancha Mahabhutas: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Behind me, there is a mountain representing earth, the ocean representing water, the Sun representing fire, the air moving the palm leaves, and the space in which all of this exists.

These elements are structures that assist not only human beings but all living beings to interact with the environment in a way that is beneficial. What is beneficial for us is not to perceive the entire environment at all times, because that would overwhelm us with information. Instead, we are designed to recognize and interpret what is important for us within the environment.

The Pancha Mahabhutas, the five great elements, arise from what are called the five Tanmatras. The word Tanmatra is full of meaning. Tan means “that,” and matra means “a portion.” The Tanmatras are portions of reality that are taken up by our sense organs so that we can sample what is outside and develop an understanding of what is happening around us.

For example, our ears hear approximately from 20 hertz, or cycles per second, up to about 20,000 hertz. But this is only a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from zero hertz through many gigahertz, terahertz, and beyond.

Our eyes also perceive only a small portion of this spectrum. They operate in the terahertz range, with visible light wavelengths measured in nanometers, approximately from 400 to 700 nanometers. In contrast, a 20 hertz sound wave is around 15 to 17 meters long.

So there is an enormous range of possible things that could be seen and heard, but we only sample a very small portion. We are interested in those specific portions because they contain the information that is useful for our survival and interaction with the world.

There is reason to believe that the same process of narrowing down information occurs with the other senses as well. One important reason for this filtering is that our processing capacity would be overwhelmed if we received all available information.

It has been estimated that we receive around 11 million bits of information every second. Approximately 10 million come through the eyes, one million through the skin, perhaps 100,000 through the ears, 10,000 through the nose, and 1,000 through the tongue. But out of those 11 million bits of information, we are only able to consciously process around 50 bits per second.

It is like a giant process of compression, similar to a JPEG image. The information is reduced while still preserving what is important and useful for us. What we experience is therefore not the complete reality, but a representation of reality that allows us to function within it.