CHAPTER 

 XIII 



THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN INFORMATION 

 PROCESSING SYSTEM 



James G. Miller, M.D., Ph.D. 



c 



CONSIDERING human beings as information processing" sys- 

 tems has in tiie last decade proved useful in both experiment and 

 theory. Some of the hoary old problems of behavior and learning 

 theory have received a new form or have been bypassed, and some 

 fruitful approaches to human individual, group, and social be- 

 havior have arisen. 



It has been estimated (1) that in fifty years of waking life an 

 individual may process 10"^ (ten thousand trillion) bits of infor- 

 mation. A person may be looked upon as a component in an 

 interpersonal system in which messages are sent from one node 

 to another along channels and through nets. As an individual, 

 he may be studied as a "black box'' whose input-output relation- 

 ships can be detei mined, or as a system of interrelated components 

 whose performance and capacities are increasingly available to 

 experimental investigation. 



At the Mental Health Research Institute of The University of 

 Michigan some of us work within the general systems orientation 

 which regards all life as a part of the physical space-time continuum. 

 We consider this continuum to be organized into a hierarchy of 

 levels of systems, all of which have subsystems and are themselves 

 subsystems of larger organizations or supersystems. The smallest 

 living system, the cell, is composed of nonliving molecules. These 

 may be free-living or may be components of organs, which in 

 turn are organized into more complex individual systems. These 



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