Hi Mark, Fascinating questions! You wrote, "My suspicion is that sorting and attending to 9 bits, would be higher performance state than sorting and attending to 5, and I'm wondering what states or contexts might influence those differences?" I wonder if the opposite could also be true? John and Carmen have written elsewhere that (paraphrasing) one of the "common denominators" of excellence is "focus". If your conscious mind has 9 slots available to hold chunks of information, could "focus" be defined as the ability to control the content of those slots and perhaps to deliberately keep several of those slots empty, "focussing" only on the 1, 2, 3...n chunks that are relevant to the issue? Could the "know-nothing" state be defined as deliberately keeping all/most of the slots empty? Could the "creative" state be defined as filling 1, 2, 3...n slots with certain information, then letting the unconscious rapidly fill the other slots with series of chunks that are directly or tangentially associated (a mental slot-machine, waiting for 3 cherries in a row)? So, to get back to your original question, perhaps the type of "sorting and attending" being done is more relevant than the number of bits being sorted, as an indicator of a high-performance state? Just some ponderings, hope they're useful! Cheers, Jon