Why Do We Live at 10bits/s? (betanews.com)
- Reference: 0175776007
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/12/27/2042226/why-do-we-live-at-10bitss
- Source link: https://betanews.com/2024/12/27/human-brain-data-slow-dial-up-modem/
> It might sound unbelievable, but the human brain [2]processes information at just 10 bits per second ! Yes, folks, that's slower than the internet speeds many of us endured during the early days of dial-up. While our senses take in billions of bits of data every second, our brain intelligently sifts through the chaos, letting through only what's important.
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> This is no accident. Researchers Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister [3]explain in their study , The Unbearable Slowness of Being, that the brain is built this way for survival. Instead of getting overwhelmed by a flood of details, the brain has a system to focus on what matters most. It ensures we act quickly and effectively without being bogged down by unnecessary information. [...] The slow pace of the human brain might seem like a drawback in today's fast-paced world, but it has been sufficient for survival throughout human history. Evolution prioritized efficiency over speed, enabling the brain to focus on critical tasks without wasting energy. While machines continue to outpace us in raw processing power, the human brain remains unmatched in its ability to prioritize and adapt.
The study raises an important question: Why does a brain capable of such complexity operate at such a slow rate?
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://betanews.com/2024/12/27/human-brain-data-slow-dial-up-modem/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627324008080?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf_download&rr=8f8c1fdc597aa34d
Okay, maybe this is unfair (Score:2)
But frankly as soon as I saw the stupid (and extremely forced) title they gave their "study", I pretty much decided I should dismiss it out of hand.
Re: (Score:2)
It's incredibly stupid because there's a lot more to our brains than the parts we use for conscious thought. That may not be as fast as other parts of the brain that evolved millions of years ago as opposed to much more recently, but it's taken immense processing power in modern computer systems to do what our (or other animal) brains do efficiently. We haven't been able to build a machine capable of consciousness yet, so there's no way to know if it's just incredibly difficult compared to other things we h
Understanding the paper (Score:3)
> But frankly as soon as I saw the stupid (and extremely forced) title they gave their "study", I pretty much decided I should dismiss it out of hand.
To achieve understanding, one only needs to read and understand 3 papers.
Firstly, there's [1]A Mathematical Theory of Communication [harvard.edu], by Claude Shannon. This paper is an easy read, you only need to read the first third (-ish?), and you can skip over the mathematics and get the gist. Just assume the mathematics are correct and believe his conclusions and you're good. The first section of that paper defines information as a measure of data.
Shannon's [2]Prediction and Entropy of Printed English [upenn.edu] is the next paper to r
[1] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf
[2] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the basic premise is incorrect.
I can read at about 400wpm, and can memorize at about half that for different bursts; many can do the same-- I'm not unique.
I can do complex math in my head, sadly from habit. This is also not unique.
I'm not special. Processing at 10bit/sec is plainly bullshit. The denominator of a bit is even worse. The mind processes many things concurrently. Reaction time (motor skill) is only one measure of many.
Consider the second violinist in a typical orchestra, who's listenin
Are you an AI? (Score:2)
> I believe the basic premise is incorrect. I can read at about 400wpm, and can memorize at about half that for different bursts; many can do the same-- I'm not unique.
Average word length is 5 letters, one bit per leete, 5*400 = 2000, then divide by 60 seconds in a minute => 33 bits/sec, and you mention that you need to go half that rate to get a memorization level, which is about 16 bits/sec.
And you think that's sufficiently distant from 10 bits/sec to invalidate the premise?
Also, you're not memorizing. Unless you can recite back what you read word-for-word, which I guarantee would be almost unique among humans.
> I can do complex math in my head, sadly from habit. This is also not unique.
So to draw an analogy, you're saying that because the com
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like they're using a very narrow definition of "processing", since we already have a pretty good idea how much data is required to reproduce convincing visual and auditory inputs. After been doing quite a bit of tweaking my own video encoding preferences for my Kodi movie library, I'd say anything less than about 1.5 gigabytes per hour of 1080p video starts to look noticeably bad. That's about 3.33 Mbps with data compression, so even after doing all the various tricks to eliminate redundancies, it's
Why? (Score:2)
The study raises an important question: Why does a brain capable of such complexity operate at such a slow rate?
Because otherwise we'd be overwhelmed and either go insane or be paralyzed. If our brain let us see, hear, smell, taste, and feel everything at the same time it would be sensory overload. Which happens to be [1]a real condition [medicalnewstoday.com]. It has to limit the data stream to keep the body functioning. It's a self-preservation mechanism. And by "It has to", I don't mean it's thinking about this process, only th
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sensory-overload#What-is-sensory-overload
It's fast enough (Score:2)
Fast enough to destroy a planet. It just takes a while.
Re: It's fast enough (Score:2)
The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Utterly fake (Score:2)
The study itself is utter trash, but makes for a good headlines so of course it gets picked up and passed around the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. trash. The authors must have neglected to study topics on information entropy, etc. As a simple example, look at a chess game. Played on a 8X8 board, 32 pieces (to start), and a lot of differences in the way pieces move. How is this encoded into 1 bit per second? Some variations of chess have a move per second, others have ranodm assignment of back row pieces.
1 bit per second for driving a car? ...Many mundane tasks would seem to make this click-bait.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know, but I remember seeing estimates that Garry Kasparov can evaluate 2 moves a second.
Define "bit" (Score:1)
From the original article at [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]:
"The game “Twenty Questions” has been popular for centuries1 as a thinking challenge. If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about million possible items in the few seconds allotted. Therefore, the speed of thinking—with no constraints imposed—corresponds to 20 bits of information over a
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627324008080
Better: define "process" (Score:2)
I saw the headline and read part of TFS/TFA and then stopped. It took just a few (say 10) seconds and yet I "processed" much more than 100 bits of information in that time. Enough information to know that I didn't want to bother reading further.
It's a slow holiday on slashdot.
I'm too slow to understand (Score:2)
What does the following mean from the abstract? It sounds like a wacky non-sequitur.
"If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about million possible items in the few seconds allotted. Therefore, the speed of thinking - with no constraints imposed - corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits/s or less."
By 2^20 I assume they are referring to a search space of a million possible items if each item were addressable via a 20 bit unique identifier.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I can personally reference a million unique items. Maybe.
Imagine if.. (Score:2)
We had to process and filter out all the nonsense that we intake, in real time and thoroughly. Life would be a nightmare.
Total BS (Score:2)
The "article" is total BS. This didn't deserve a post.
The Doors of Perception (Score:2)
Interestingly this theory is similar to that of Aldous Huxley's in the classic "The Doors of Perception" (if you've ever listened to The Doors, you know the famous American Band, that's their namesake). Essentially, he posits that the brain's function is largely reductive and it ignores or reduces most of its sensory input to essentially filter out elements unnecessary for survival. Huxley believed psychedelics disrupt the efficiency of this filter, leading to states analogous with religious rapture, arti
Dumb question (Score:2)
Why do humans run so slow? Why are we so weak? Why do we have no fur, no claws, no fangs?
Same reason we supposedly "only process 10 bits/s". Because we don't need to do more.
Decent earnings (Score:2)
A bit per second, 86400 seconds per day, 12.5 cents per bit. Works out to $10K a day. I wish I ran at 10 bps.
How is it measured? (Score:2)
Maybe some top-level, executive function of our brain gets fed information at 10bps, but we offload a lot of processing to other parts of our brain and nervous system to simplify things down.
For example, the bandwidth of the optic nerve is estimated to be about [1]10Mb/s [uh.edu] per eye. But clearly we don't "perceive" at 10Mb/s; different parts of our brain process the info and send us much lower-bandwidth info like "That's a stop sign" or "That's an apple."
[1] https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/3153
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, that's what the paper said. I guess I should have read it before commenting.
Click-Bait response. (Score:2)
a bit of analog information is way more than 1 bit of binary - stop with the apples and oranges.
The human body has more than just raw inputs to our brain, muscle memory is a thing. A car analogy: modern cars have self contained subsystems scattered all over the vehicle and they only send basic info to the central control unit.
We are also highly parallel and our database lookup for memory is near instant, um well, until we get older and now that memory is so full that the lookup takes a bit of time to
Oh bullshit (Score:1)
If you understand something quickly but it takes you hours or days to explain it to me, or vice versa, clearly one of us is going faster than the other.
Bits != bits (Score:2)
A "brain bit" is not the same as a "computer bit". This comparison is stupid. When a human identifies a car it takes maybe 3 bits, "car", "red", model. A computer would use billion of bits for the same task.
Seems high (Score:2)
It takes me much more than a second to do 8b/10b encoding in my head. Makes for very slow Infiniband transactions when I have to toggle it in by hand.
10bit that is comcasts new speed 10bit that is com (Score:2)
10bit that is comcasts new speed when you hit your cap