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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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[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

In some contexts, a bit can refer to a boolean variable, a flag. In other contexts, it may refer to the voltage at a certain point, or any number of other things. But when you are talking about bits/s then it's a measure of information.

These are not the same thing because the amount of information contained in a bit is not always equal to one bit of entropy.

Yes, but as you know, this implies that the information is already available. You can use that knowledge to create a compression algorithm, or to define a less redundant file format. That's very practical.

We can also be a bit philosophical and ask: How much information does a backup contain? The answer could be: By definition, 0 bits. That's not a useful answer, which implies a problem with the application of the definition.

A more interesting question might be: How much information does a file contain, that stores the first 1 million digits of the number π?