People tend to feel that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they can express in real time. Elon Musk has spoken publicly about this “bandwidth issue” to podcaster Joe Rogan. In fact, Musk is so bothered by this that his long-term goal is to create an interface that allows the human brain to communicate directly with computers, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking and writing. I am one of them.
If Musk succeeds, he will likely be disappointed. According to a new study published in neuronhumans think at a constant, excruciatingly slow rate of about 10 bits per second, and remember things, make decisions, and imagine things at that rate. In contrast, the human sensory system collects data at approximately 1 billion bits per second. This biological contradiction highlighted in a new paper is likely due to the false sense that our minds can carry out a seemingly infinite number of thoughts simultaneously, a phenomenon the study authors consider the “mask illusion.” It may be contributing.
“The human brain is much more sophisticated than we think,” says study co-author Marcus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology. “It’s incredibly slow when it comes to decision-making, and it’s ridiculously slower than any device we interact with.”
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Meister and co-author Jieyu Zhen, a doctoral candidate in neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology, also found in a paper that the human brain can only do one thing at a time, and only slowly. I’m emphasizing it. So even if Musk were to manage to connect his brain to a computer, he wouldn’t be able to communicate with it any faster than he could with a phone, Meister said.
The new study builds on decades of psychological research showing that humans selectively perceive only a small portion of the information provided by sensory experiences. “There’s a limit to what we can pay attention to, and that’s what becomes our conscious experience and what we remember,” Meister says. What past research has lacked, he continues, is “a sense of numbers.” He and Zheng created a new review paper to fill that quantitative gap.
Meister and Zheng collated data from research across a variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, technology, and human performance. They performed their own calculations using data ranging from the processing speed of single neurons to the cognitive performance of memory champions, allowing them to be compared across studies.
Nearly a century of research has repeatedly determined that human cognition functions at approximately 5 to 20 bits per second, with a rough estimate of approximately 10 bits per second. . “This was a very surprising number,” says Chung. Based on this finding, she and Meister also calculated that the amount of information a person can learn over a lifetime could easily fit on a small thumb drive, she added.
However, the authors found that human sensory systems, such as vision, smell, and hearing, operate much faster than cognition, about 100 million times faster. “When you put these numbers together, you can see that, wow, there’s such a huge difference,” Meister said. “That contradiction creates interesting new opportunities for science to organize research differently.”
The wealth of information conveyed by our senses also contributes to the mistaken notion that we are very clearly aware of every detail and contrast in our surroundings. But that is “obviously not true,” Meister said. When people are asked to describe what they see outside the center of their gaze, “we can barely tell anything,” he says. Because our eyes can focus on every detail in our surroundings, even though we actually have to focus on specific visual details to perceive them, “our minds “It gives the illusion that they are always present at the same time,” he continues. . A similar phenomenon occurs with mental abilities. “In principle, we can have different thoughts and direct our cognition in different ways, but in reality we can only have one thought at a time,” Meister says. Masu.
Another problem that contributes to overestimation of one’s own mind is the lack of a standard of comparison, he added. “There’s no way to step outside of yourself and realize that this isn’t really something to be proud of,” he says.
The findings raise questions across many areas, from evolution and technology to comparisons between species, the authors write. But one of the questions Meister and Chung are most interested in is whether the prefrontal cortex, thought to be the center of personality and behavioral control, houses billions of neurons. Despite this, the question is why do we have a fixed decision-making ability that processes information using only 10 bits? every second. The authors think the answer may have to do with the brain’s need to frequently switch tasks and integrate information between different circuits. However, testing that hypothesis will require more complex behavioral studies.
Another important unanswered question, Meister said, is why the human brain can only do one thing at a time. “If you could run 1,000 thoughts in parallel at 10 bits per second each, the difference wouldn’t be this big,” he says. Why humans are unable to do this is a “deep mystery about which almost nothing is understood.”
Tony Zador, a neuroscientist at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who was not involved in the study but was mentioned in the paper’s acknowledgments section, called the paper “brilliant and thought-provoking.” It states that it presents what seems to be newly recognized fundamental points. The truth about the brain’s upper limit, which is “about the same pace as casual typing or conversation.”
“Nature seems to place a speed limit on our conscious thought, and no amount of neuroengineering may be able to circumvent it,” Zadol says. “Why? We don’t actually know, but it’s probably a result of our evolutionary history.”
Nicole Rust, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was also not involved in the study, said the new study could change the way neuroscientists approach some research.
“Our peripheral nervous system can process thousands of items in parallel, so why can it only do one thing at a time?” she says. “Any theory of the brain that attempts to explain all the fascinating things we can do, like planning and problem-solving, has to account for this contradiction.”
