According to research, humans process thoughts at only 10 bits per second a recent paper Published by Caltech researchers. In comparison, human senses collect data at billions of bits per second. So if you feel overwhelmed by what’s going on around you, that’s natural.
The research paper, called “Unbearably Slow: Why Do We Live at 10 Bits/Second?” considers the human neural substrates that limit thinking so slowly and proposes new research to investigate this “bottleneck” as it has been quantified.
Caltech scientists Professor Markus Meister and graduate student Jieyu Zheng authored the paper, which highlights the differences between outer and inner brain data throughput. They question why the inner brain—the vast trove of data we experience—runs so slowly, even though it’s home to about a third of the brain’s 85 billion neurons.
The researchers said they took an information-centric approach to measuring human thinking speed and applied a wide range of techniques based on information theory. In addition to conducting their own experiments, the Caltech researchers also measured human performance in tasks such as reading and writing, playing video games and solving Rubik’s cubes, to arrive at their titled “10 bits per second” assessment.
“That’s an extremely low number,” Mester admitted of the results. “Every moment, we extract 10 bits from the trillions of bits received by our senses and use these 10 bits to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This presents a paradox. Theory: What is the brain doing to filter all this information? Despite our highly parallel senses, it remains a mystery why most people can only think about one thing at a time.
So this research paper seems to raise a lot of questions, but Meister and Zheng already have some ideas about the leisurely pace of the human mind. “Our ancestors selected a niche in which the world was slow enough to make survival possible,” Zheng and Meister wrote in the research paper. “Indeed, it was only necessary in the worst-case scenario 10 bits per second, and most of the time our environment changes much more slowly.”
Here are some more implications about technology, e.g. brain-computer interface (brain-computer interface). For example, the researchers considered whether neural interfaces would be affected at the same effective 10 bits per second rate. Perhaps this research will lead to a faster way to connect internal and external brain processes, making better use of these billions of neurons.