Scientists measure exact speed of human thought and the results are surprising
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Brain processes signals from sensory organs at only about 10 bits per second, researchers say. Scientists have finally quantified the brain’s speed limit in processing human thought, an advance that reveals why we are able to process only one thought at a time.
The human body’s sensory systems, including the eyes, ears, skin, and nose, gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second. However, researchers have found that the brain processes these signals at only about 10 bits per second – a speed millions of times slower than the inputs.
The bit is the basic unit of information in computing with a typical Wi-Fi connection processing about 50 million bits per second. The brain has over 85 billion neurons with a third of these involved in high-level thinking and located in the more developed cortex region of the outer brain.
Researchers assessed existing scientific literature on human behaviours like reading, writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik’s Cubes, and calculated that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second – a number that they call “extremely low”.
The findings were published in the journal Neuron last week. “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,” research co-author Markus Meister said.
“This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all this information?” Dr Meister said. Individual nerve cells in the brain are known to be powerful information processors, easily capable of transmitting over 10 bits per second of information.
