Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ 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?
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 appears in the journal Neuron.
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’s Cubes, to calculate that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.
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