The Tiny Stream of Consciousness

I have always found the neuroscience consciousness interesting, especially in the 90s as neuroscientists began to formulate theories based on a surge of interest and research on the topic. Consciousness is where we experience our awareness of everything around us, new thoughts and old memories, so naturally it is going to be something we would want to research and understand. But then I came across this chart below a few years ago. It shows the amount of information our brain receives per second through the 5 sensory systems. Of these 11,000,000 bits of information, our consciousness is only capable of handling 100 bits. So our stream of consciousness is a very, very, very tiny stream. Put another way, only 0.000009% of the information coming in through our 5 senses is able to reach our conscious awareness. And this rule applies to any source of information, whether it is recalling memories, developing new ideas, or any other mental event that we experience consciously. Initially, this caused me to have quite a few startling revelations and questions about consciousness. How is this information filtered? Is consciousness even useful? What does this suggest about free will? But then it led me to ask more questions about the unconscious processing of the brain. The unconscious brain is receiving 100% of the 11,000,000 bits of sensory information at every given moment. And it is being analyzed and processed. The conscious brain is where we perceive free will, contemplate life, and think about things like I am doing right now. It is impossible to imagine living without it. Yet in terms of information processing, its bandwidth is incredibly small, especially compared to the bandwidth of the unconscious brain. So if we want to understand human nature, we should focus on understanding the processes of the unconscious brain. This enormous task would eventually reveal the nature of consciousness. While scientists are currently tackling research questions related to both the unconscious and conscious brain, I don’t believe the studies on consciousness will contribute much toward our understanding of human nature.