Science: Brain operating speed update

Note: It has been pointed out that comparing brain data processing speed with computer bits may not by a meaningful comparison. Although a computer bit is understood, a human thought is not understood physically or in terms of its subjective nature. Therefore, the attempt to measure the "speed of thought" in bits per second that is discussed in the quoted article may be fundamentally misaligned with the nature of human cognition and consciousness. In other words, this could be basically wrong. This is another indication of how complex the human mind and consciousness are and how difficult it is to study the human brain-mind.

Over the years, I've followed research that deals with research about the data processing bandwidth of the human brain. My interest in this started after I read Tor Norretrander's amazing 1991 book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size. At that time, information scientists and other researchers estimated that human consciousness was a serial processing phenomenon that operated at between about 1 and 50 bits/second depending on the task it was engaged in. 

By contrast, the unconscious mind was estimated to be running as a parallel data processing phenomenon dealing with about 11.2 million bits/second from all sensory inputs, sight, hearing, smell, touch, etc. Unconsciousness was postulated to act as a data sorter and discarding phenomenon that allows only a tiny bit of input to flow into the conscious mind. If I recall right, a later research paper tweaked the consciousness bandwidth estimate to about 50-500 bits/sec. 

The boffins at Caltech have reconsidered the brain data processing thing once again, this time lowering the conscious data processing speed to within the range that Norretranders wrote about in 1991:

Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies' sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once?

A bit is a basic unit of information in computing. A typical Wi-Fi connection, for example, can process 50 million bits per second. In the new study, Zheng applied techniques from the field of information theory to a vast amount of scientific literature on human behaviors such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik's Cubes, to calculate that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.

"This is an extremely low number," Meister says. "Every moment, we are extracting just 10 bits from the trillion that our senses are taking in and using those 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?" [I think the brain is designed to filter out nearly all incoming data so consciousness does not get overwhelmed and blow a fuse]

There are over 85 billion neurons in the brain, with one third of these dedicated to high-level thinking and located in the cortex. Individual neurons are powerful information processors and can easily transmit more than 10 bits per second of information. But why don't they? And why do we have so many if we're thinking so slowly? Meister suggests that, given the discovery of this "speed limit" in the brain, neuroscience research ought to consider these paradoxes in future studies.

The new quantification of the rate of human thought may quash some science-fiction futuristic scenarios. Within the last decade, tech moguls have suggested creating a direct interface between human brains and computers in order for humans to communicate faster than the normal pace of conversation or typing. The new study, however, suggests that our brains would communicate through a neural interface at the same speed of 10 bits per second.

The researchers raise questions like why is there such a stark contrast between unconsciousness and consciousness. What sets this speed limit on the pace of our consciousness is unknown. They also ask (i) why the brain needs billions of neurons to process a puny 10 bits/s, and (ii) why can we only think about one thing at a time? They postulate that the brain operates 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.

Brain bandwidth research, along with cognitive biology and social behavior sciences, have significantly shaped how I view human beings, the human condition and human civilization. In essence, we are not very smart if being smart amounts to higher bandwidth. Maybe the state of being "smart" requires a lot more than 10 bits/sec operating in serial processing mode. If that is true, one can step back and look at what humanity has accomplished so far, which is amazing in my opinion. One can also how easily humanity can fly off the rails. Research like this also helps me visualize and understand why dark free speech is so amazingly powerful and effective with so many people. The cognitive load needed to simply accept dark free speech is far higher than it is to critically analyze it to find the bad content.

By Germaine: Brain bandwidth aficionado