Human brain’s processing speed is far slower than the internet, a study reveals

How often have you felt restless when the internet speed goes down? Imagine you are on a group call with your homies during the holiday season and suddenly your screen froze. You will go bananas for sure! You will curse the router, or the internet provider for the slow internet speed. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 25 million bps, and in an American home, the download rate is about 262 million bps. Yet most of us won’t feel it speed enough. But have you ever thought about how fast your brain is? Well, not fast enough!

According to a new study, the human brain processes information very slowly. Imagine 10 bps. Yes, that’s right. A recent study, 'The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?' published in the journal Neuron reveals that the human brain processes thought at a very slow pace.

The study led by Jieyu Zheng, a graduate student at Caltech, 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's Cubes. They found out that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.

Even though there are 85 billion neurons in the brain, and each of them is capable of processing information faster than 10 bits per second, it doesn't. The scientists are wondering what the reason could be.

They found out that the brain operates in two modes. The outer brain absorbs high-dimensional sensory information and motor signals, while the inner brain is in charge of processing the information needed to control behavior, which is less data, compared to the data absorbed by all the senses.

"This is an extremely low number. Every moment, we are extracting just 10 bits from the trillion that our senses are taking in and using those 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?" co-author Markus Meister of CalTech said in a release.

The research suggests that the primitive creatures with a nervous system used their brains primarily for navigation, mostly to move toward food and away from predators. As human brains evolved from these, it could explain why we 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,” they said.



“Our ancestors have chosen an ecological niche where the world is slow enough to make survival possible. In fact, the 10 bits per second are needed only in worst-case situations, and most of the time our environment changes at a much more leisurely pace," the authors added.