There is "endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is," says California Institute of Technology neuroscientist Markus Meister. "If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow."
In a new scientific paper, titled "The unbearable slowness of being," Meister's lab reveals that the speed of information in your brain is about 10 bits per second. As comparison, a typical home internet connection has a download speed of around 25 million bits per second. As part of the study, the researchers used information theory to analyze the behaviors of videogamers, competitive Rubik's Cube solvers, typists, and memory champions.
Interestingly, they also reveal that our nervous system filters out the vast majority of information that our senses take in. For example, they approximate that our eyes have the capacity to transmit 1.6 billion bits of visual information per second yet the optic nerve has a throughput of just 100 megabits per second.
Carl Zimmer writes in the New York Times:
"Psychological science has not acknowledged this big conflict," Dr. Meister said. More researchers should ask why we toss out so much information and get by on so little, he said.
Britton Sauerbrei, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in the new study, questioned whether Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng had fully captured the flow of information in our nervous system. They left out the unconscious signals that our bodies use to stand, walk or recover from a trip. If those were included, "you're going to end up with a vastly higher bit rate," he said.
But when it comes to conscious tasks and memories, Dr. Sauerbrei said, he was convinced that very little information flows through the brain. "I think their argument is pretty airtight," he said.
