Get the latest tech news

Caltech Scientists Have Quantified the Speed of Human Thought | Human thought operates at 10 bits per second, vastly slower than sensory input.


Caltech researchers found that humans think at 10 bits per second, far slower than the billion bits per second gathered by sensory systems. This limitation, rooted in evolutionary navigation systems, explains why we process one thought at a time.

However, our bodies' sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once? The research was conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister(PhD '87), the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, and it was led by graduate student Jieyu Zheng.

Get the Android app

Or read this on r/tech

Read more on:

Photo of CalTech

CalTech

Photo of speed

speed

Photo of bits

bits

Related news:

News photo

The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

News photo

DJI Neo drone firmware update adds more speed and vertical video

News photo

Controlling the Speed of Light for In-Memory Computing