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

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 91 points 1 week ago (16 children)

We don’t think in “bits” at all because our brain functions nothing like a computer. This entire premise is stupid.

[–] nelly_man@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Bit in this context refers to the Shannon from information theory. 1 bit of information (that is, 1 shannon) is the amount of information you receive from observing an event with a 50% chance of occurring. 10 bits would be equivalent to the amount of information learned from observing an event with about a 0.1% chance of occurring. So 10 bits in this context is actually not that small of a number.

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Their model seems to be heavily focused on visual observation and conscious problem solving, which ignores all the other things the brain is doing at the same time: keeping the body alive, processing emotions, maintaining homeostasis for several systems, etc.

These all require interpreting and sending information from/to other organs, and most of it is subconscious.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

It's a fair metric IMO.

We typically judge super computers in FLOPS, floating-point-operations/sec.

We don't take into account any of the compute power required to keep it powered, keep it cool, operate peripherals, etc., even if that is happening in the background. Heck, FLOPs doesn't even really measure memory, storage, power, number of cores, clock speed, architecture, or any other useful attributes of a computer.

This is just one metric.

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