People think many millions of times slower than the average internet connection, scientists have found.
The body’s sensory systems, including the eyes, ears, skin, and nose, gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second.
But the brain processes these signals at only about 10 bits per second, millions of times slower than the inputs, according to author Markus Meister.
A bit is the unit of information in computing. A typical Wi-Fi connection processes about 50 million bits per second.
Despite the brain having over 85 billion neurons, researchers found that humans think at around 10 bits per second – a number they called ‘extremely low’.
Writing in the scientific journal Neuron, research co-author Markus Meister said: ‘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 this information?’
Individual nerve cells in the brain are capable of transmitting over 10 bits per second.
However, the new findings suggest they don’t help process thoughts at such high speeds.
This makes humans relatively slow thinkers, who are unable to process many thoughts in parallel, the research suggests.
This prevents scenarios like a chess player being able to envision a set of future moves and only lets people explore one possible sequence at a time rather than several at once.
The discovery of this ‘speed limit’ paradox in the brain warrants further neuroscience research, scientists say.
They speculated that this speed limit likely emerged in the first animals with a nervous system.
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These creatures likely used their brains primarily for navigation to move toward food and away from predators.
Since human brains evolved from these, it could be that we can only follow one ‘path’ of thought at a time, according to researchers.
‘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,’ scientists say.
The findings suggest machines can eventually excel at any task currently performed by humans as their computing power doubles every two years.
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