“How Fast Do We Think? Human Brain Processes Signals at 10 Bits per Second”
Have you ever wondered how fast our brains work? Well, scientists have recently quantified the brain’s speed limit. They revealed that from sensory organs, the brain processes signals at only about 10 bits per second.
This speed is millions of times slower than the input rate, as the human body’s sensory systems gather data about the surrounding environment at a rate of a billion bits per second.
Researchers claimed that the stark contrast between these numbers touches on fundamental aspects of brain function.
85 billion neurons in brain
The research conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister, a professor of Biological Sciences at Caltech, was led by a graduate student, Jieyu Zheng.
Study co-author Markus Meister maintained that 10 bits per second is an extremely low number. Every moment, humans extract just 10 bits of information from the trillions their senses take in, using those 10 bits to perceive the world and make decisions.
Meister questioned: “This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?”
Researchers pointed out that there are over 85 billion neurons in the brain, with one-third of these dedicated to high-level thinking and located in the cortex.
Individual neurons are powerful information processors and can easily transmit more than 10 bits per second of information. But why don’t they? And why do we have so many if we’re thinking so slowly? Meister suggests that, given the discovery of this “speed limit” in the brain, neuroscience research ought to consider these paradoxes in future studies, according to a press release.
Powerful information processors
Researchers claimed that individual nerve cells in the brain are known to be powerful information processors, easily capable of transmitting over 10 bits per second of information.
However, the new findings suggest they don’t help process thoughts at such high speeds, making humans relatively slow thinkers unable to process many thoughts in parallel. This prevents scenarios like a chess player being able to envision a set of future moves and only lets people explore one possible sequence at a time rather than several at once. Scientists claimed that the discovery of this “speed limit” paradox in the brain warrants further neuroscience research, reported The Independent.
It’s now being speculated that this limit could have emerged in the first animals with nervous systems.
The research suggests that the earliest creatures with a nervous system used their brains primarily for navigation, to move toward food, and away from predators. If humans’ brains evolved from these simple systems to follow paths, it would make sense that humans can only follow one “path” of thought at a time.
“Human thinking can be seen as a form of navigation through a space of abstract concepts,” Zheng and Meister write. The research team stressed the need for future research into how this constraint—one train of thought at a time—is encoded in the architecture of the brain.
Published in the journal Neuron, the research also maintains that the brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain.
Source: Interesting Engineering
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“How Fast Do We Think? Human Brain Processes Signals at 10 Bits per Second”