Bits and bytes do not seem to play a very big role in BCI, but in fact, they do. Lots of data needs to be transferred, and because it uses a constant internet connection, all that data must be streamed live. If you were to monitor your daily internet usage, you would probably be surprised at the numbers. Some people may use as much as gigabytes per day while others may use as little as a few megabytes. Either way, millions of bytes are being moved around every day.
What exactly do you do on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Do you only checked your feed? Download a few pictures? Watch a few videos of your friend doing crazy backflips down the street? All of this information is made up of bits and bytes (for the purpose of this blog post, we'll just stick to bytes from now on). Although your wall feed may only use a couple hundred kilobytes a day, pictures and videos tend to use a whole lot more. All those millions and billions of bytes would need to be transferred wirelessly from your brain to your computer. BCI is in charge of inputting and outputting that data.
Once BCI is capable of sending information to your brain for interpretation, that information needs to somehow be presented. The typical way for computers to display information is through a video stream on your computer monitor. If this were the case for BCI, even more information must be transferred. Think about your computer's display resolution for a second. An HD display is effectively streaming an HD movie all the time (and that's disregarding all the calculations a video card has to do). That's a lot of bytes to transfer, and a tiny device planted in your brain would have to handle all of this.
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