Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second
(2025/01/01)
- Reference: 1735756214
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/01/boffins_peg_brain_data_rate/
- Source link:
Caltech researchers have estimated the speed of human thought to be a mere 10 bits per second, a data rate so leisurely that it underscores the need for further research into brain function and calls into question claims about brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence.
In [1]a paper [PDF] titled, "The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?," published in the journal [2]Neuron on Tuesday, Jieyu Zheng, a Caltech graduate researcher, and Markus Meister, professor of biological sciences, explore the cognitive conundrum of the human brain.
Why, they ask, does the inner brain process thought at about 10 bits per second while the outer brain – which handles sensory information – operates 100 million times faster, at about 10 ^9 bits per second.
[3]
The authors muse, "The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: What neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time?"
[4]
[5]
Zheng and Meister arrived at the 10 bits/s estimate for the speed of thought by analyzing prior studies conducted over the last century of human behavioral throughput for various behaviors and activities. These include: binary digit memorization (4.9 bits/s); speech in 17 different languages (39 bits/s); listening comprehension in English (13 bits/s); object recognition (30-50 bits/s); StarCraft (10 bits/s); typing (10 bits/s).
This is consistent with prior work that suggests humans [6]communicate at a rate of about 40 bits/s .
[7]
This also has implications when trying to estimate the storage capacity of the human brain, which the researchers say could be accommodated on a 5GB thumb drive, if a person absorbed data at a rate of 10 bits/s, 24 hours a day, for 100 years.
The Caltech authors observe that people like to think their inner lives are far too complex to be expressed in real-time speech, as allowed by a brain pipeline running at 10 bits/s. But that's just an illusion, they say.
"Because we could engage in any one of the 2 ^10 possible actions or thoughts in the next second, it feels as though we could execute them all at the same time," they state in the paper. "In practice, however, they happen sequentially."
[8]
But this illusion about human mental throughput has consequences, they argue, because technologists believe it.
For example, Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk has described his brain implant company thus in [9]a 2018 interview : "The purpose of neuro-link is to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI, because we have a bandwidth problem. You just can't communicate through your fingers. It's too slow."
Zheng and Meister don't believe a high-bandwidth interface is necessary to communicate with the brain.
"Based on the research reviewed here regarding the rate of human cognition, we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s," they write. "Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition."
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
[10]Neuralink brain chips head for the Great White North
[11]Second patient receives the Neuralink implant
[12]China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces
[13]Your pacemaker should be running open source software
Meister in email told The Register that he believes the tech community should revisit its requirements for direct brain communication in light of the speed of thought.
"[Musk] says in that interview, he wants this interface to be available for everyone, the man on the street," Meister said. "That’s almost certainly not going to work. We argued there’s plenty of evidence to say that no matter what, you can't think faster than 10 bits per second. So yes, massive reevaluation would be useful here."
The MIT Technology Review last year [14]reported that the speed of thinking sets a limit on brain implant bandwidth, while also acknowledging that there are potential applications where higher throughput might be applicable, particularly for restoring bodily functions, through techniques like motor neuron monitoring.
Yet, Zheng and Meister express skepticism about the need for high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for patients with impaired senses or motor control.
They point to efforts to restore vision using electrode arrays implanted in the eye to stimulate ganglion cells with signals from a video camera, which required data rates on the order of gigabits per second.
"While driven by good intentions, this approach has been altogether unsuccessful: After decades of efforts, all the implanted patients [15]remain legally blind ," they note. "The major companies behind this approach have now gone out of business, and their patients are left [16]carrying abandoned hardware in their eyeballs ."
A more practical approach (and one [17]deployed successfully in 2018 ), they say, involves having a computer translate the visual scene to speech in real time and then describe it in words – at a cognitively comprehensible data rate.
"The important principle for both sensory and motor BCIs is that one really needs to convey only a few bits per second to and from the brain, and those can generally be carried by interfaces that don't require drilling holes in the user's head," the authors argue.
While much remains unknown about how the human brain actually functions, the authors suggest there's enormous opportunity for new discoveries to advance human knowledge.
"The key is to observe the human brain under conditions of complex behavior where for example the specific task you're engaged in switches several times a second," said Meister. "We're currently starting such experiments with human subjects under realistic conditions like driving a car in simulation and electrode recordings from neurons in different brain areas. But there is room for a great deal more inventiveness, and creativity in designing new experiments here." ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10234
[2] https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://direct.mit.edu/pvar/article-abstract/7/5/509/18199/Note-on-Information-Transfer-Rates-in-Human
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[9] https://youtu.be/x5pgAM26wuM?feature=shared&t=38
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/21/neuralink_canada/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/second_patient_receives_the_neuralink/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/china_brain_computer_interface_standard/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/12/column/
[14] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/29/1080472/elon-musk-bandwidth-brains/
[15] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31866339/
[16] https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
[17] https://elifesciences.org/articles/37841
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
In [1]a paper [PDF] titled, "The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?," published in the journal [2]Neuron on Tuesday, Jieyu Zheng, a Caltech graduate researcher, and Markus Meister, professor of biological sciences, explore the cognitive conundrum of the human brain.
Why, they ask, does the inner brain process thought at about 10 bits per second while the outer brain – which handles sensory information – operates 100 million times faster, at about 10 ^9 bits per second.
[3]
The authors muse, "The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: What neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time?"
[4]
[5]
Zheng and Meister arrived at the 10 bits/s estimate for the speed of thought by analyzing prior studies conducted over the last century of human behavioral throughput for various behaviors and activities. These include: binary digit memorization (4.9 bits/s); speech in 17 different languages (39 bits/s); listening comprehension in English (13 bits/s); object recognition (30-50 bits/s); StarCraft (10 bits/s); typing (10 bits/s).
This is consistent with prior work that suggests humans [6]communicate at a rate of about 40 bits/s .
[7]
This also has implications when trying to estimate the storage capacity of the human brain, which the researchers say could be accommodated on a 5GB thumb drive, if a person absorbed data at a rate of 10 bits/s, 24 hours a day, for 100 years.
The Caltech authors observe that people like to think their inner lives are far too complex to be expressed in real-time speech, as allowed by a brain pipeline running at 10 bits/s. But that's just an illusion, they say.
"Because we could engage in any one of the 2 ^10 possible actions or thoughts in the next second, it feels as though we could execute them all at the same time," they state in the paper. "In practice, however, they happen sequentially."
[8]
But this illusion about human mental throughput has consequences, they argue, because technologists believe it.
For example, Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk has described his brain implant company thus in [9]a 2018 interview : "The purpose of neuro-link is to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI, because we have a bandwidth problem. You just can't communicate through your fingers. It's too slow."
Zheng and Meister don't believe a high-bandwidth interface is necessary to communicate with the brain.
"Based on the research reviewed here regarding the rate of human cognition, we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s," they write. "Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition."
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
[10]Neuralink brain chips head for the Great White North
[11]Second patient receives the Neuralink implant
[12]China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces
[13]Your pacemaker should be running open source software
Meister in email told The Register that he believes the tech community should revisit its requirements for direct brain communication in light of the speed of thought.
"[Musk] says in that interview, he wants this interface to be available for everyone, the man on the street," Meister said. "That’s almost certainly not going to work. We argued there’s plenty of evidence to say that no matter what, you can't think faster than 10 bits per second. So yes, massive reevaluation would be useful here."
The MIT Technology Review last year [14]reported that the speed of thinking sets a limit on brain implant bandwidth, while also acknowledging that there are potential applications where higher throughput might be applicable, particularly for restoring bodily functions, through techniques like motor neuron monitoring.
Yet, Zheng and Meister express skepticism about the need for high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for patients with impaired senses or motor control.
They point to efforts to restore vision using electrode arrays implanted in the eye to stimulate ganglion cells with signals from a video camera, which required data rates on the order of gigabits per second.
"While driven by good intentions, this approach has been altogether unsuccessful: After decades of efforts, all the implanted patients [15]remain legally blind ," they note. "The major companies behind this approach have now gone out of business, and their patients are left [16]carrying abandoned hardware in their eyeballs ."
A more practical approach (and one [17]deployed successfully in 2018 ), they say, involves having a computer translate the visual scene to speech in real time and then describe it in words – at a cognitively comprehensible data rate.
"The important principle for both sensory and motor BCIs is that one really needs to convey only a few bits per second to and from the brain, and those can generally be carried by interfaces that don't require drilling holes in the user's head," the authors argue.
While much remains unknown about how the human brain actually functions, the authors suggest there's enormous opportunity for new discoveries to advance human knowledge.
"The key is to observe the human brain under conditions of complex behavior where for example the specific task you're engaged in switches several times a second," said Meister. "We're currently starting such experiments with human subjects under realistic conditions like driving a car in simulation and electrode recordings from neurons in different brain areas. But there is room for a great deal more inventiveness, and creativity in designing new experiments here." ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10234
[2] https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[6] https://direct.mit.edu/pvar/article-abstract/7/5/509/18199/Note-on-Information-Transfer-Rates-in-Human
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z3XJDReb0I4Tip_FruDXwwAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://youtu.be/x5pgAM26wuM?feature=shared&t=38
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/21/neuralink_canada/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/second_patient_receives_the_neuralink/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/china_brain_computer_interface_standard/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/12/column/
[14] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/29/1080472/elon-musk-bandwidth-brains/
[15] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31866339/
[16] https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
[17] https://elifesciences.org/articles/37841
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"listening comprehension in English (13 bits/s)" Huh?
Jou (Mxyzptlk)
How exaclty do they measure that listening to English, in my case second language, is only 13 bits per second? How slow has a typical movie to be slowed down to speak this slow?
The 40 bits/s later mentioned in the article sounds more likely, if syllables can be interpreted as one byte each.
One the other hand: "binary digit memorization (4.9 bits/s)" huh what? No, I am not that good at memorizing arbitrary numbers and have to write them up if they are important. Or copy paste them. Only a few really important numbers are actually memorized in my brain, everything else has more or less than one or a few second(s) TTL :D.
Re: "listening comprehension in English (13 bits/s)" Huh?
katrinab
I'm pretty sure there isn't an ADC module in our brain, so talking about bits per second is surely pretty meaningless?
We do convert the sound waves into some sort of underlying meaning, and while you could represent that in binary, I don't think that is necessarily what actually happens.
Re: "listening comprehension in English (13 bits/s)" Huh?
Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Which is exactly my point! Completely out of whack measurement. Will probably on Sabine Hossenfelders next youtube video "A study so stupid it makes all 'new quantum physics' suddenly look good! Even string theory is better than that! Even my haircut looks better, which it quite a stretch!"
Love the title
Paul Johnston
Obviously a fan of Kundera.
we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s,
Neil Barnes
Seems a generous estimate, given his reported output on social media...
Re: we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s,
Ropewash
We're talking quantity here. Quality is a whole other topic.
Thought experiment.
Pete 2
Count the number of words in this article. Decide how many bits are required to encode each word. Calculate the amount of time it would take to assimilate the article's bit content at 10 bps.
Compare that number with the time it took to read.
Consider whether 10bps stands up to an empirical analysis.
Re: Thought experiment.
katrinab
It would be about 15 bits per word, but I don't think we always encode words individually, sometimes we might encode a group of words together, and the context the words are used in will affect how we encode them.
Also, if you just encode the words, you ignore punctuation. Some of the "words" we use work in the same way as punctuation in giving meaning to the sentence.
Re: Thought experiment.
Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Obviously drunk snail reading speed :D.
"Because we could engage in any one of the 2^10 possible actions or thoughts in the next second,...
And therein lies the crux of the story.
It is not about the speed of sequentially processed data. It is about the next state, which is determined in parallel. You do not need to do many, many fast serial calculations. You simply do a very slow parallel one to get to the same conclusion. It is probably more energy efficient the way it works, maybe not optimal, but probably better than other topologies.
Though, I guess that there are some more than 1024 (2 10 ) next states as suggested. The brain is also likely not to be a purely parallel binary choice mechanism as there is a temporal component too.