I read this really interesting article on the web about how slow humans think, “The Unbelievable Slowness of Thinking.” That’s just me all over. The gist is of it is that we think slower than you’d imagine creatures with advanced brains would think. I don’t have a great feel for what the stated rate feels like: 10 bits/second. It doesn’t help much to look up the definition on Wikipedia, “…basic unit of information in computing and digital communication.” It’s a statistical thing and I barely made it through my biostatistics course in medical school. In fact, the authors calculated that the total amount of information a human could learn over a lifetime would fit on a small thumb drive.
Anyway, I tried to dig through the full article in Neuron and didn’t get much out of it except I recognized the story about Stephen Wiltshire, a guy with autistic disorder who could draw New York’s skyline from memory after a helicopter flyover. I saw it on an episode of the TV show UnXplained.
I was amazed even if he processes at only 10 bits/second, according to the authors.
By the same token, I thought the section called “The Musk Illusion” was funny. It refers to the notion many of us have that our thinking is a lot richer than some scientists give us credit for. That’s the Musk Illusion, and it refers to Elon Musk the billionaire bankrolling Neuralink to make a digital interface between his brain and a computer “to communicate at an unfettered pace.” How fast do the authors of this paper think the system works? It flies at about 10 bits/second. They suggested he might as well use a telephone. The scientists weren’t that impressed judging from the quotes in the Reception section of the Wikipedia article about Neuralink.
Anyway, regardless of how slowly we think, I believe we’ve made a lot of progress for a species descended from cave dwellers who were prone to falling into piles of mastodon dung. I bet it took considerably longer than 10 bits/second for them to figure out how to climb out of that mess.
Reference:
Jieyu Zheng, Markus Meister,
The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
Neuron
2024,
ISSN 0896-6273,
Abstract: Summary
This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼10 bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.
Keywords: human behavior; speed of cognition; neural computation; bottleneck; attention; neural efficiency; information rate; memory sports
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