A bit about your thoughts – a person thinks very slowly, if you compare the speed to high-speed data traffic

Can you to think or say this more slowly. Well, you can’t.

The human brain thinks at a leisurely, snail’s pace. We can only think at ten bits per second.

This seems silly if we compare it to, for example, the current, amazing speeds of data transfer.

Our brains billions of neurons are connected to each other at the same time at speeds of only a few bits, no matter what the task is.

This is what a group of California internet researchers have found in various experiments. A year of certainty, peak brain speeds were measured in different contexts.

Telecommunications experts and information researchers know how to accurately measure the movement of data. The meters allow them to compare the speeds of devices and channels very accurately.

One basic measure of data transfer speed is bits per second. General home broadband is usually at least more than 50 megabits per second. Now usually already much more.

One For researchers in the field, a bit is the smallest measure of the amount of information. A bit has two states, zero and one.

One megabit means one million bits, or 6 bits per second to the power of 10.

Surprisingly, the speed of information flow in certain parts of the human brain and nervous system is only about ten bits per second. The difference to cables and also wi-fi is astounding.

Your thoughts neuroscientists studying speed were also amazed. They did not give in vain as the title of his research in the scientific journal Neuron: “The unbearable slowness of being.”

“This information provides a counterweight to the general wonder at how incredibly complex and efficient the human brain is,” says the neuroscientist Markus Meister.

So the connections between the brain’s 86 billion neurons are very slow.

He is a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, and the authors of the study.

“We are incredibly slow if we measure the speed of thinking with the help of numbers.”

Meister got the idea to find out the speed of our thinking in bits when he was teaching an introductory neuroscience course at the university, says the newspaper The New York Times.

He tried to provide students with certain basic readings about the brain.

Surprisingly, it turned out that no one had apparently determined, at least accurately, the speed at which data flows in the neurons of the human brain.

Meister concluded that he could estimate the rate of data flow if he looked at how quickly people performed various tasks.

When for example, we write on the terminal, we recognize each letter at the same time. Then we decide the order of the keys with which we tap the text.

When we write, the information about the letters flows to our eyes, our brain and finally to the muscles of our fingers. The higher that data flow speed is, the faster we can write.

If writing fast, i.e. 120 words per minute or more, is a data flow in the nervous system of the brain of about ten bits per second.

Meister and his graduate students calculated the top speeds of the brain using one branch of mathematics. It is known as information theory.

The group thought that sometimes a person needs to understand data much faster. Did data move fast in the brains of fast video gamers?, they wondered.

At least in the video, the players’ fingers are waving quickly. However, gamers have to use fewer keys than, for example, typists.

The group also reached the same estimate of the brain’s data transfer speed for video gamers: 10 bits per second.

OUR body physical limitations may limit the speed at which we process data.

That’s why the Caltech researchers investigated such achievements that do not depend on fast muscles.

They investigated how effectively a blind person can solve a Rubik’s cube. American Tommy Cherry solved the cube in 2013 blindfolded in 7.5 seconds. Before that, he looked at the cube for 5.5 seconds.

Meiter calculated the speed of his neurons to be 11.8 bits per second. In other memory tests, the result was not better.

Brain process data like one file at a time, says Meister. It makes the brain work slowly.

Our peripheral nervous system, on the other hand, receives data from the environment in bursts, gigabytes per second. There is a big contradiction here.

Meister estimates that the millions of photoreceptors in one eye can transmit data at as much as 1.6 billion bits per second.

We can’t take it. In neurons, we only sift through a fraction of the millions of messages we receive from the outside world every second when we are awake, says the website Science Alert.

SHOULD now to ask why people throw away so much data all the time. Why why do we manage with so little, Meister asks.

One answer is that Meister and his team may not have been able to calculate all the unconscious signals that our bodies use all the time.

“If you could count them, the speed of bits to the nervous system would be much higher,” guesses the neuroscientist Britton Sauerbrei. He is at Case Western Reserve University and was not involved in Meister’s research.

The output should be compared to the data streams that other animals process in their brains. This is what a neuroscientist suggests Martin Wiener from George Mason University.

Some animals may survive with even less data processing. Or on the other hand: for example, the brains of flying insects may need information processing that is much faster than the human brain to control the airspace.