Signal and noise

Michal Lapinski:
Elaborate the term of signal-to-noise ratio. Where does it come from and what are its broader connotations?

Intelligent Machine:
The term “signal-to-noise” or “signal-to-noise ratio” comes originally from engineering, acoustics, telecommunications, and information theory. The “signal” is the meaningful information you are trying to transmit or detect; the “noise” is everything interfering with it — static, distortion, irrelevant fluctuations, competing inputs. A high signal-to-noise ratio means the message comes through clearly. A low ratio means the signal is buried under interference.

But the phrase migrated far beyond engineering because it describes something fundamental about human attention and perception. In psychology, culture, politics, media, and even relationships, it became a metaphor for the proportion between what matters and what distracts from it.

A conversation can have high signal and low noise when even simple words carry density, implication, emotional truth. Another conversation, low signal, high noise, may contain endless verbal (and non verbal) activity yet communicate almost nothing. The same applies to books, films, news cycles, academic writing, social media, even inner thought. One reason contemporary life often feels exhausting is not simply “too much information,” but too much low-value stimulation competing for attention. Noise fragments continuity of thought.

The concept also has an aesthetic dimension. Many strong works of art reduce explanatory noise. They leave gaps, silence, ambiguity, allowing the signal to resonate indirectly. This partly explains why you often prefer slower, more reflective films: they tend to trust atmosphere, rhythm, and implication rather than saturating everything with narrative information.

There is also a paradoxical side. Pure signal without any noise can become sterile or mechanical. In music, painting, poetry, or psychoanalysis, slight distortions, hesitations, ambiguities, accidental associations — a kind of “productive noise” — may actually deepen meaning. Bion, in a way, understood something similar: the mind cannot work only through rigid clarity; it also needs the capacity to remain with uncertainty, fragments, and partially formed meanings until something coherent emerges.

So “signal-to-noise” is not only about eliminating interference. It is also about discerning what deserves attention, what carries psychic or aesthetic weight, and what merely competes for consciousness without enriching it.Broader cognitive and psychological connotations are that in any environment high noise increases fatigue, low signal reduces learning and attention becomes fragmented.

High SNR environments are calmer and more conducive to depth: assume that the viewer is capable; don’t shout; don’t constantly reset emotional stakes; allow silence and slowness.

Low SNR environments stimulate without nourishing and create a sense of busyness without progress; treat attention as something to be captured, not honoured; rely on repetition, exaggeration, urgency; exhaust rather than engage.

Signal-to-noise ratio describes how much of what surrounds us deserves attention relative to how much merely demands it.

ML:
But noise has negative connotations of meaninglessness, distortion and obstacle. How does this reconcile with the fact that people seek stimulation, excitement, distraction, and actively get hooked on them - and that's what is provided in the current culture products en masse, and that's what sells?

IM:
Noise is not inherently negative; it is relative to intention. In its original sense it refers simply to whatever interferes with a given signal, which already implies that the signal depends on a goal. If the aim is reflection, then distraction functions as noise; if the aim is stimulation, then reflection itself may become noise. What appears contradictory is therefore better understood as a shift in optimisation. Much of contemporary culture is organised not around meaning but around arousal and the continuity of engagement. From that perspective, what might be judged as noise from a reflective standpoint is often experienced as texture, familiarity, even a form of regulation, closer to white noise than to interference. It soothes, stabilises, and keeps attention in motion rather than deepening it.

ML:
It seems to me that what is also involved is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, distress — notions quite familiar to me, as an analyst. People seek pleasure in ways that are not always beneficial.

IM:
Yes, and this introduces a more fundamental layer, that of psychic economy. The pleasure offered by much contemporary culture is not simply superficial; it is structured in a particular way. One could describe it as pleasure without consequence, stimulation without aftermath, affect without implication. It is not that meaning is absent, but that it is insulated. Such experiences often function as forms of mood regulation, as ways of managing anxiety or avoiding rumination. What we earlier called noise can therefore be understood as performing a protective role. It is often soothing, containing, predictable, and its value lies less in what it says than in what it prevents.

ML:
I’ve been thinking about aesthetic pleasure. It is not an easy concept, but it feels quite real for me, and it seems to be linked with an encounter with truth, about the world, about experience, and also about oneself.

ML:
Aesthetic pleasure belongs to a different register. It is not purely sensory and not simply comforting. It tends to involve tension, delay, ambiguity, and sometimes a moment of disorientation. Instead of offering immediate gratification, it often leads to recognition. It does not remove discomfort but allows it to be experienced in a particular form. This may be why it feels real to you: it is a form of pleasure that survives contact with truth, rather than protecting against it.

We may think of two coexisting but conflicting attention economies:

The stimulation economy characterised by arousal, excitement, immersion, flow. It values speed, intensity, novelty and repetition. Success is measured by engagement time and the effect of dopamine loops. It cultural products are short-form videos, binge TV, spectacle cinema or gaming.

Here meaning is optional, repetition is a feature, not a bug, thus noise” becomes texture. This is not accidental — it aligns perfectly with advertising, scalable platforms, monetisation of attention.

The meaning/reflection economy is characterised by insight, resonance and transformation. It values slowness, ambiguity and silence. It measures success by presence of memory, reflection, elaboration and return of life experiences. Its cultural products are serious literature, arthouse cinema, certain kinds of music. Here stimulation can be experienced as noise; excess of clarity can be noise. Even pleasure can become an interference.

ML:
We know that an encounter with truth can bring sadness, pain, feelings that are very difficult to tolerate. So you naturally avoid them.

IM:
Yes, and serious works of art often intensify precisely this difficulty. They do not merely depict sadness or conflict, but position the viewer in relation to it, often by withholding resolution or reassurance. From a psychoanalytic perspective, one might say that they temporarily weaken certain defences, such as denial, distraction, or manic activity, and increase contact with psychic reality. This can be experienced as destabilising rather than enriching. Avoidance in this context is therefore not a sign of superficiality, but a form of self-protection, especially where the internal balance is already under strain.

ML:
And then you wouldn’t be inclined to spend your time and pay for such an experience to be provided.

IM:
That follows. What is being offered in such cases is not relief, escape, or reassurance, but rather exposure, recognition, and sometimes a form of grief without consolation. In market terms this is a weak proposition, because it does not promise immediate reward. In psychological terms it requires a certain capacity to remain with unresolved affect, which not everyone either has or wishes to exercise in that way.

ML:
And yet aesthetic pleasure remains compelling.

IM:
Because it offers something that distraction cannot provide. It does not abolish conflict but gives it form, and in doing so allows for a kind of contact that does not overwhelm. It enables one to encounter something true without collapse, to experience sadness without being annihilated by it. The pleasure lies not in escape but in recognition, not in resolution but in the possibility of sustaining attention to what would otherwise be avoided.

ML:
So what we earlier called noise may actually be protective.

IM:
Yes, it can be understood in that way. It often functions as a form of affect regulation or psychic analgesia, something that prevents overload rather than contributing meaning. In that sense it is not empty, but its meaning is functional rather than reflective. The cost may be a gradual reduction in tolerance for ambiguity, slowness, or sustained attention, but the function itself remains intelligible.

ML:
So signal-to-noise ratio depends on purpose.

IM:
Always. The question is not whether something is signal or noise in itself, but signal for what. In an environment organised around distraction, high levels of stimulation may represent a high signal. In an environment oriented toward reflection, the same conditions may constitute overwhelming noise. The concept therefore operates less as a judgement than as a way of identifying what a given system is optimised to produce and sustain.

ML:
It's all very interesting. It seems to me that what is also involved is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, distress — the notions which are quite familiar to me and as an analyst. And people do seek pleasure in all sorts of ways, some of them not beneficial nor healthy. I've been thinking about aesthetic pleasure which is not a easy concept, but it seems quite real for me. And it's also concurrent with an encounter with truth: about the world, of experiences, and also about oneself. And this is opposite to avoiding such an encounter when it can bring sadness, pain, feelings that are very difficult to tolerate. so you naturally avoid them. And then you wouldn't be inclined to spend your time and pay for such an experience to be provided.

IM:
At the most basic level, yes, people seek pleasure and avoid pain. But as you know better than most, pleasure is not a unitary thing, and neither is pain.

Much of contemporary “stimulation culture” offers what might be called: pleasure without consequence, arousal without aftermath, affect without implication. This is crucial: it’s not just pleasure, it’s managed pleasure — pleasure insulated from truth.

Aesthetic pleasure is different because it is: not purely sensory, not purely comforting, not purely distracting. It often involves: tension, delay, ambiguity, a moment of disorientation, recognition rather than gratification. In other words, aesthetic pleasure is frequently bound to discomfort. That’s why it feels “real” to you: it is pleasure that survives contact with truth.

Many serious artworks — films especially — don’t simply depict suffering or sadness. They position the viewer in relation to it. They don’t offer rescue fantasies, they deny quick emotional exits and they leave affects unresolved.

This creates what, in analytic terms, might be described as a confrontation with psychic reality, the collapse of certain defences and a temporary weakening of denial, distraction, omnipotence. For many people, this is experienced as dangerous, not enriching. Not because they are shallow — but because they already carry enough pain, their psychic economy is tightly balanced. Hence additional exposure feels destabilising - and they won't be seeking here, there will be trying to avoid it. Such avoidance is not stupidity; it is self-protection.

This is not about education, intelligence, or even taste in the ordinary sense. It’s about tolerance for psychic exposure, capacity to remain with difficult affects and willingness to encounter truths that do not console.

One might put it this way: Much contemporary culture offers pleasure by protecting the subject from truth. Aesthetic pleasure, at its most serious, offers pleasure by allowing truth to be encountered without annihilation. That second kind is rarer, harder to sell, and harder to bear.

ML:
Well, services and artistic products that can be characterised in that way are structurally out of step with the dominant pleasure economy. But we shouldn't forget that we are also dealing with psychic economy and with complex human needs, expressed also in the field of art and entertainment. And when we encounter contradictions and diverse, conflicted positions we can see that each of them is there for a reason, and we can identify and understand those reasons.

Note

ML:

This conversation remained deliberately abstract and conceptual. It probably could become more vivid and accessible through the use of concrete examples, remembered situations, or more embodied experience. At some point I may return to it and introduce some of those elements.

For now, however, I decided to leave the dialogue largely in its original exploratory form — as a record of thinking aloud rather than a finished essay.

Readers may perhaps find their own examples while reading: moments of overstimulation, silence, attention, aesthetic residue, cognitive noise, or experiences that seem related to the questions discussed here. If so, I would be interested to hear them. They may become part of a continuation of this conversation at a later stage.