Surprisingly slow speed of human thought calculated by Caltech

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"... From this, the team concludes that around 10 bits per second is a good average for the rate of human thought. ...

"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,” ..."

"... There are over 85 billion neurons in the brain, with one third of these dedicated to high-level thinking and located in the cortex. Individual neurons are powerful information processors and can easily transmit more than 10 bits per second of information. But why don't they? ...

Another conundrum that the new study raises is: Why does the brain process one thought at a time rather than many in parallel the way our sensory systems do? ...

Research suggests that the earliest creatures with a nervous system used their brains primarily for navigation, to move toward food and away from predators. If our brains evolved from these simple systems to follow paths, it would make sense that we can only follow one "path" of thought at a time. ..."

From the abstract:

"This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢09 bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this."

Surprisingly slow speed of human thought calculated by Caltech

Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior (original news release) "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 billion 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 unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? (no public access)