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Scientists have finally quantified brainIt is speed limit in processing human thought, an advance that reveals why we are only able to process one thought at a time.
The sensory systems of the human body, including the eyes, ears, skin and nose, data on our environment at the speed of a billion bits per second.
However, researchers have found that the brain processes these signals at only about 10 bits per second, a speed millions of times slower than the inputs.
The bit is the basic unit of information in computing with a typical Wi-Fi connection processing around 50 million bits per second.
The brain has more than 85 billion neurons, a third of which are involved in high-level thinking and are located in the most developed cortical region of the outer brain.
The researchers evaluated existing scientific literature on human behaviors like reading, writing, playing video games and solving Rubik’s Cubes, and calculated that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second – a number that they describe as “extremely weak”.
The results were published in the journal Neuron last week.
“At any given moment, we extract only 10 bits from the trillion that our senses absorb and use these 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions,” said Markus Meister, co-author of the research.
“This raises a paradox: what does the brain do to filter all this information? » said Dr. Meister.
Individual nerve cells in the brain are known to be powerful information processors, easily capable of transmitting more than 10 bits of information per second.
However, the new findings suggest that they don’t help process thoughts at such high speeds, making humans relatively slow, unable to process multiple thoughts in parallel.
This prevents scenarios like that of a chess player imagining a set of future moves and only allows users to explore one possible sequence at a time rather than several at a time.
The discovery of this “speed limit” paradox in the brain warrants further research in neuroscience, scientists say.
Scientists believe that this speed limit probably arose in the first animals with a nervous system.
These creatures likely used their brains primarily for navigation to navigate toward food and away from predators.
Since the human brain evolved from these simple systems for following paths, we may only be able to follow one thought “path” at a time, in the same way, researchers say.
“Our ancestors chose an ecological niche where the world was slow enough to allow survival,” they write.
“In fact, 10 bits per second is only necessary in the worst situations, and most of the time our environment evolves at a much slower rate,” the scientists say.
The findings suggest that machines can eventually excel at any task currently performed by humans, as their computing power doubles every two years.
“So the discussion about whether self-driving cars will achieve human-level performance in traffic already seems quaint: roads, bridges, and intersections are all designed for creatures that process at 10 bits/s,” add the scientists.
“At this point, humans will be advised to stay out of these ecological niches, just as snails should avoid highways,” they write.