Advertisers' lack of vision

There's an ad for something or other on TV at the moment, where a chap is walking through a forest dropping photos. The smug narration goes something like "In your lifetime, your eyes will capture 24 million different images…" which is obviously intended to make the viewer gasp in awe at the miracles the human body is capable of. I don’t know where the ad agency got their data from (though, at a guess, "24 million" sounds like one of those figures plucked casually out of the air by a goatee-bearded ad exec in between power lunches and odious backslapping), but it's clearly a load of old tosh.

Life expectancy in the UK is about 75 years (or 2,365,200,000 seconds). This means that for the eyes to capture only 24 million images you'd only glimpse what was going on around you around once every 49 seconds, even taking into account spending half your life asleep. This seems fairly unmiraculous. For instance, this would mean that you'd miss 98% of a film (or TV programme. In fact, the only instance where this would be of benefit, is if you were sat in front of an hour long ITV drama starring Caroline Quentin which might consequently seem only a merciful fraction of its 60 minute length).

In reality, the average number of images the eye is capable of capturing is far more than 24 million in a lifetime, or an hour or even a second, being, as it is, infinite. Because the eye continually streams images to the brain, the number of individual snapshots is incalculable, as it can always be subdivided again and again.

The average number of good ideas a typical ad exec is capable of producing however, is far less than 24 million. Around 24 million less so in fact.