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Human thought crawls at 10 bits per second, Caltech study finds (www.techspot.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Thanks to @General_Effort@lemmy.world for the links!

Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior

Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0

Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

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[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But it isn't stored that way and it isn't processed that way. The preprint appears to give an equation (beyond my ability to understand) which explains how they came up with it.

[–] Tramort@programming.dev 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Your initial claim was that they couldn't be measured that way. You're right that they aren't stored as bits, but it's irrelevant to whether you can measure them using bits as the unit of information size.

Think of it like this: in the 1980s there were breathless articles about CD ROM technology, and how, in the future, "the entire encyclopedia Britannica could be stored on one disc". How was that possible to know? Encyclopedias were not digitally stored! You can't measure them in bits!

It's possible because you could define a hypothetical analog to digital encoder, and then quantify how many bits coming off that encoder would be needed to store the entire corpus.

This is the same thing. You can ADC anything, and the spec on your ADC defines the bitrate you need to store the stream coming off... in bits (per second)

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world -3 points 2 days ago

As has been shown elsewhere in this thread by Aatube a couple of times, they are not defining 'bit' the way you are defining it, but still in a valid way.