A new study is “a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” one researcher said.
In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.
Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 25 million bps. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps.
Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps. They titled their study, published this month in the journal Neuron, “The unbearable slowness of being.”
“It’s a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” said Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the study. “If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow.”
Dr. Meister got the idea for the study while teaching an introductory neuroscience class. He wanted to give his students some basic numbers about the brain. But no one had pinned down the rate at which information flows through the nervous system.
Dr. Meister realized that he could estimate that flow by looking at how quickly people carry out certain tasks. To type, for example, we look at a word, recognize each letter and then sort out the sequence of keys to press. As we type, information flows into our eyes, through our brains and into the muscles of our fingers. The higher the flow rate, the faster we can type.