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SUNDAY SCIENCE: THE SPEED OF HUMAN THOUGHT LAGS FAR BEHIND YOUR
INTERNET CONNECTION, STUDY FINDS  
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Carl Zimmer
December 28, 2024
New York Times
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_ A new study is “a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole
about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” one
researcher said. _

Stanley Chapel, a student at the University of Michigan, solves a
Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded, during a “speedcubing” event in
2022., Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

 

In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow
internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls,
the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of
information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.

Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a
high-definition video takes about 5 million bps.
[[link removed]] The
download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps
[[link removed]].

Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the
human brain: just 10 bps. They titled their study, published this
month
[[link removed](24)00808-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627324008080%3Fshowall%3Dtrue] in
the journal Neuron, “The unbearable slowness of being.”

“It’s a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how
incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” said Markus
Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology
and an author of the study. “If you actually try to put numbers to
it, we are incredibly slow.”

Dr. Meister got the idea for the study while teaching an introductory
neuroscience class. He wanted to give his students some basic numbers
about the brain. But no one had pinned down the rate at which
information flows through the nervous system.

Dr. Meister realized that he could estimate that flow by looking at
how quickly people carry out certain tasks. To type, for example, we
look at a word, recognize each letter and then sort out the sequence
of keys to press. As we type, information flows into our eyes, through
our brains and into the muscles of our fingers. The higher the flow
rate, the faster we can type.

In 2018, a team of researchers in Finland analyzed
[[link removed]] 136 million
keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers. They found that, on average,
people typed 51 words a minute. A small fraction typed 120 words a
minute or more. Dr. Meister and his graduate student, Jieyu Zheng,
used a branch of mathematics known as information theory to estimate
the flow of information required to type. At 120 words a minute, the
flow is only 10 bits a second.

“I was thinking, of course there must be faster behaviors,” Ms.
Zheng recalled. She suspected that championship videogame players
might have a higher information flow when they are competing. “You
can look at them on YouTube, and their fingers are so fast that
they’re just blurred on the videos.”

Though gamers move their fingers quickly, they have fewer keys to
choose from than a typist does. And so, when Ms. Zheng took a close
look at the performance of gamers, she ended up with the same estimate
for their rate of information: 10 bits per second.

Perhaps, the researchers thought, our bodies’ physical limitations
create an information bottleneck. To test that possibility, they
analyzed mental feats that don’t depend on fast muscles.

One of these feats is known as blind speedcubing, in which a player
looks at a Rubik’s cube, puts on a blindfold and solves it. At a
2023 competition, the American speedcuber Tommy Cherry needed just
5.5 seconds [[link removed]] to inspect
his cube, which he then solved in 7.5 seconds. Ms. Zheng and Dr.
Meister calculated Mr. Cherry’s information rate during his
inspection: just 11.8 bps.

Even people with extraordinary visual recall have a relatively low
information flow. In a memory sport called the 5 Minute Binary,
players try to memorize a long string of 1s and 0s. They get five
minutes to look over pages
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numbers and then, after a 15-minute break, try to recall as much of
the sequence as they can.

The world record for this game was set in 2019 by the Mongolian memory
champion Munkhshur Narmandakh, who recited 1,467 numbers
[[link removed]!]. Dr. Meister and
Ms. Zheng estimated that she did this with an information flow of just
4.9 bps.

The speed of human thought is dwarfed by the flood of information that
assaults our senses. Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng estimated that the
millions of photoreceptor cells in a single eye can transmit 1.6
billion bps. In other words, we sift about one bit out of every 100
million we receive.

“Psychological science has not acknowledged this big conflict,”
Dr. Meister said. More researchers should ask why we toss out so much
information and get by on so little, he said.

Britton Sauerbrei, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University
who was not involved in the new study, questioned whether Dr. Meister
and Ms. Zheng had fully captured the flow of information in our
nervous system. They left out the unconscious signals that our bodies
use to stand, walk or recover from a trip. If those were included,
“you’re going to end up with a vastly higher bit rate,” he said.

But when it comes to conscious tasks and memories, Dr. Sauerbrei said,
he was convinced that very little information flows through the brain.
“I think their argument is pretty airtight,” he said.

Martin Wiener, a neuroscientist at George Mason University, said that
the new study should prompt researchers to compare our information
flow with that of other animals.

“A lot of people haven’t paid attention to other species,” Dr.
Wiener said. It’s possible that some animals will get by on even
slower rates of information. Or perhaps flying insects that make
split-second changes to their flight patterns enjoy torrents of
information flowing through their brains that we mere humans can only
imagine.

A CORRECTION WAS MADE ON Dec. 28, 2024. Because of an editing error,
an earlier version of this article misstated the broadband speed
needed to stream a high-definition video. It takes about 5 million
bps, not 25 million.

_CARL ZIMMER: I write the Origins column
[[link removed]] for THE NEW YORK TIMES and
cover news about science._

_I report on life — from microbes at the bottom of the sea to
high-flying migratory birds to aliens that may dwell on other planets.
For my column, I focus on how life today got its start, including our
own species. Along with covering basic science, I write stories about
how biological discoveries evolve into medical applications, such as
editing genes and tending to our microbiome._

_I wrote my first story for The Times in 2004. In 2013 I became a
columnist. I began my career in journalism at Discover Magazine, where
I rose to senior editor. I went on to write articles for magazines
including The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired and Time._

_I also write books about science. My next book is “Air-Borne: The
Hidden History of the Life We Breathe,” to be published in February
2025. I am an adjunct professor at Yale’s Department of Molecular
Biophysics and Biochemistry, where I teach seminars on writing and
biology lecture courses. I have also coauthored a textbook on
evolutionary biology, now in its fourth edition._

_My books and articles have earned a number of awards, including the
National Academies Communication Award and the Stephen Jay Gould
Prize, given out by the Society for the Study of Evolution. I have won
fellowships from the Johns Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I contributed to
the coverage that won The Times the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
in 2021. I am, to my knowledge, the only writer after whom both a
species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named._

_I live with my wife in Connecticut, alongside salt marshes rife with
snapping turtles._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
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Ask Ethan: Do gravitons need to exist?
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Ethan Siegel
Big Think/Starts With A Bang
Electromagnetism, both nuclear forces, and even the Higgs force are
mediated by known bosons. What about gravity? Does it require
gravitons?
December 20, 2024

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