Scientists measured the speed of human thought and were surprised… in the negative.
Let’s get the horse out of the rain. The human brain processes information at a surprisingly slow rate of just 10 bits per secondreveals a new study, which overturns any conviction that we are ultra-fast at thinking.
The discovery, by neurobiologists Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister of the California Institute of Technology at Neuron on December 17, highlights the stark contrast between the brain’s cognitive processing and the immense computational power of modern computers, capable of performing trillions of operations per second.
Unlike the brain’s peripheral nervous system, which collects sensory data at gigabit speeds in parallel, the brain’s internal thought processes work in a unique, sequential manner. This bottleneck creates a puzzling disparity between the wealth of sensory data we receive and the limited information we consciously process.
“At each moment, we extract just 10 bits from the trillions of bits that our senses collect, using these bits to perceive the world and make decisions,” says Meister. Researchers argue that despite the brain’s complexity, its capacity for conscious information processing is slow and rarely exceeds tens of bits per second.
An evolutionary necessity?
The findings highlight everyday tasks that demonstrate this limitation, notes .
Solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded requires processing at about 12 bits per second, while the professional-level strategy game StarCraft requires about 10 bits per second. Reading this article, for example, may cause processing to briefly peak at 50 bits per second.
The researchers highlight how little is known about the internal mechanisms of the brain. Despite its 80 billion neurons that form trillions of connections, the brain works in a limited way and with a single wire, instead of taking advantage of its full potential —unlike simpler creatures like fruit flies, whose neurons work collectively to process information quickly enough for their needs.
This strangulation may result from a evolutionary necessity.
“Our ancestors adapted to an ecological niche in which the environment changed slowly enough to allow survival“, they explain. Most of the time, decision-making requires only a few bits of information per second, as external changes occur gradually.
Future advances, such as the integration of human cognition with parallel computer processing, may challenge this natural limitation. Understanding how our brains have evolved to process information could also guide the development of artificial intelligence, making it better suited to imitating human thought patterns, the team emphasizes.
