Originally posted by: wfbberzerker
the eyes throw out an enormous amount of information.
edit: err... rather your brain throws out a lot that your eyes perceive.
Very lossy compression.
It probably depends on the person - I hear a short musical score, like just the intro to a show, and a minute later, I can't remember most of it. If I read a sentence, I can probably read it back verbatim. That helped me a lot in school, on standardized vocabulary tests.
Any classes where the teacher would do a lot of talking, with very few handouts, I either took notes, or I remembered nothing.
So my ears have compression akin to compressing a 5.1 Dolby stream down to an 8kbit 8KHz mono Mp3 file. Eyes are using high quality MPEG2 compression.