{"id":201824,"date":"2024-12-18T02:13:56","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T08:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/the-brains-processing-paradox-study-quantifies-the-speed-of-human-thought"},"modified":"2024-12-18T02:13:56","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T08:13:56","slug":"the-brains-processing-paradox-study-quantifies-the-speed-of-human-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/the-brains-processing-paradox-study-quantifies-the-speed-of-human-thought","title":{"rendered":"The brain\u2019s processing paradox: Study quantifies the speed of human thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-brains-processing-paradox-study-quantifies-the-speed-of-human-thought3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies\u2019 sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion 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?<\/p>\n<p>The research was conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, and it was led by graduate student Jieyu Zheng. A paper describing the study <a href=\"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S0896627324008080\" target=\"_blank\">appears<\/a> in the journal Neuron.<\/p>\n<p>A bit is a basic unit of information in computing. A typical Wi-Fi connection, for example, can process 50 million bits per second. In the new study, Zheng applied techniques from the field of information theory to a vast amount of scientific literature on human behaviors such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik\u2019s Cubes, to calculate that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies\u2019 sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,418,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-internet","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}