This is definitely one of those "we proved that bumblebees can't fly" circumstances where they're not asking the right questions and coming to a conclusion that is painfully easy to disprove.
The researchers are daft. Our thoughts are not the equation. They are the output. They are the e of the mc2. They are the answer 42 to the question that is everything. They are the graph that holds an infinite number of points upon its line.
That's always been a misconception, mainly by people pushing anti-science narratives. The whole "bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly when they obviously can" thing was used as an example of how either we didn't know something about physics or about bee mechanics. It was never scientists declairing that bumblebees couldn't fly, it was meant as an example of how we don't know everything and that there is more to learn. As it turned out, after more research we discovered that bumblebees can fly because of the mechanics of their wings which have a very fast "double beat" mechanic that allows for greater lift.
And why, when faced with certain situations, time slows. Our brains go just fast enough for daily activities, but there is a turbo button effect when needed.
@@davidegaruti2582 great point to bring up. "Oh, you only think at 10bps", "OK and how come I output more than that?" "Uhhh..." I wish Kyle expanded a little bit on how they claim we encode stuff into those 10 bits
I think you meant subconsciously because unconscious means knocked out. But I agree with what you mean. He mentioned a little bit of that, our senses move faster in our ability to sense things but thinking about those senses moves very slow comparatively.
We do not think serially. We process data not only parallel, but hugely multitasking. Add on the amount of autonomous processing going on and 10 bits per sec is just a "researcher illusion".
Yeah. Personally, I think there is a huge difference between the conscious thoughts we have where we codify ideas, feelings, actions and objects with language, taking several seconds and when I just imagine the situation and the possible feelings in what seems like an instant. Try to think about going for ice cream. But use no words, think about the actions of going there, waiting in line, ordering, paying, eating, but not like a movie- just visualize situation. That's waaay faster than when you just do math, for example. Computers are really fast at doing math and solving logical puzzles, but our intelligence seems to work a lot better at solving problems so complex, using math to have more precision makes us less efficient. Which makes sense for the evolution of mammals.
I can argue there's pre-computation going on and then some optimization in the brain itself. So the 10 bit is the last part of the chain, which we can't reduce any further without compromising functionality. Assuming the 10-bit is correct.
@@jongyon7192p my reply to that teacher is to hold up my hand, wiggle all my fingers, and ask him if I had to think about every single action of my fingers individually.
I'd love to know what they define as "thought" and how, if it is slower than the manual process of Morse code, then how did humans send and receive messages "faster" than their brains can process.
I dont think thats where the dissconnect is... Waves, like we can measure human brains using... are inifnite bits. They are waves not descreet bits. They are entire functions and formulas being carried out not a binary.
@@mokjac it is right. Consider you learn to perform working through muscle memory, which will require less actual thinking. Consider reaction times, where they can be trained to be super fast. What’s happening isn’t that you’re actually reducing the speed of the electric signals coming from your senses, but your computing time to create a response. A trained response needs a lot less computation, and works my faster. Think of it this way: conscious thought is writing out a command and then sending it. Trained responses (such as morse code and speaking) are like copy pasting existing pieces of commands to create a response. Copy pasting will inevitably be faster.
Would be nice if they mentioned their metric in the abstract to their paywalled article or anywhere in the Scientific American report on it. My guess is if you have a song stuck in your head while fiddling with a pen, walking and talking, being generally aware not to bump into someone and subconsciously monitoring for alarming sounds smells or sights, then only the words coming out of your mouth are counted.
Yes because anything that is a repeatable pattern is not counted as the circuit is already activated, which required only 1 bit to operate. It's more like 10 light switches igniting many different circuits at once, and altering those circuits. So the actual amount of information needed to push these actions is very little. Like telling a robot to move a predetermined path, only 1 bit is used to initiate the activity, and other to alter that activity to another path. This is why babies are dumb. They don't have these pathways created so they are significantly limited on this 10 bit per second processing speed. Or when you are learning something completely new without any, even slightly related knowledge to the subject. You don't have any previous information to light up, so it feels more challenging.
@Modikie You're trying to rationalise something that makes no sense. Bits per second is a measure of rate of information transfer. So there's simply no way that's true, considering we can type and speak at an even faster rate. These aren't repeated functions and require thought before the action is completed.
@nanayawagyen-kokuro5069 look into neuroscience. Every action we do is predicted based on prior information making things easy for us. Try learning a skill, any skill. Why is it now so much easier to do that skill with practice? Patterns get created which become almost effortless to accomplish. Imagine being a baby now. Can't walk, can't do much of anything. Are babies just stupid? Well, yes but no. They're constantly gaining new information about the world they've never experienced before, while their brains are optimizing itself to adapt to this new environment. Things that would require effort and thought into, become automatically actuator out of habit and formed neural pathways. This is how LLM's work. This is how every intelligent system works. Seriously, look into any new thing like a new software. You're not having to locate everything every time you use it, you form quick pathways in your brain to expect something to be there, based on experience. So if the data about the brain really only working at 10 bit/s is true (which since they're the scientists and not us, that's probably the case), then maybe it's what we consider information and how we operate is incorrect. Most of your life is on autopilot, quickly picking between many billions and trillions of neural pathways to find the one that's perfect for what you're doing, right now to make it happen effortlessly. If those pathways don't exist, then it will be created at some point via necessity.
My BS detector is going crazy. If we can only think at the speed of Morse code, then sending Morse code would take up 100% of our mental capacity, which clearly isn't true
Because our brains likely process which neuron streams would be activated, 10 times per second. This means there is way more actual information being passed, we're just using it far more efficiently because we're using existing u information pathways, and switching between them at 10 times per second to decide what pathway to use next. Thats how I understood this. The bits wouldn't be each light bulb on a Christmas tree, but a single activation, or switch between different pathways for electricity to flow, to the overall tree. And if most systems are automatic, it requires even less processing power because you're just using single switches to activate or deactivate larger circuits, which you can switch between, at a rate of 10 bits per second. Which leads to significantly higher output. Imagine being a baby and learning things for the first time. This is a look at what that processing speed would feel like, without the efficient patterns created through living life.
Think of it this way: You make 10 decisions in 1 second, but execute millions of processes in the same second. Similarly, a computer acts when we tell it to do something, but simultaneously does millions of stuff in the background to make it happen.
I would imagine this is due to human evolution focusing heavily on automatic control we don’t need to think fast because it was more advantageous to be able to do quick movements that are either involuntary and/or automatic. Specifically the autonomic and somatic nervous systems.
Well it was mainly done for efficiency, consciously doing stuff in parallel would be horrible for efficiency as it would require a lot more energy to do so. Where the subconscious mind is efficiently created & structured in a way to do this. The conscious mind basically gets and sends information from the subconscious mind.
i have layers to my thought The fast lane, where thousands of thoughts enter and leave at incredible speeds the medium lane, where most of my plans and thoughts come from, still fast but slow enough to actually hear and then my conscious thoughts, they are the slow ones, like half the speed of speaking
@@blueteamepsilon7798 nah, they go there from your subconscious, in which they shall forever remain, always ready to hunt you in your dreams or whenever you stay late at night instead of sleeping 😂
The important detail is that we don't think all in one line, we think in parallel. That means that it's 10 bits per second across a huge portion of our brain happening individually. Also, the concepts we represent with each of those bits are MASSIVE in terms of information, but it doesn't seem like a lot because of how abstracted it is.
its more than just that... Processors and transistors have hard-wired connectivity through a single pipeline of capacity, but brains have huge interconnected and tangled masses of neurons with more bridges and connections being made all the time. 10 hertz is kinda crazy when you consider the billions of diverging and converging pathways each pulse can take.
Those huge abstract thoughts of data also dont need to be transferred from ram into a computational core, its more like ram mutating ram in a way that computes.
Exactly. Human brain is capable of unimaginable PARALLEL workloads. Not to mention, neural pathways are governed by more than just electrical potential: theres chemical and physical aspects which expand the potential outcomes by factors. A stored memory is a combination of specific chemical markers, attachment sites and energy potentials. Increasing the CAPACITY and FLEXIBILITY by orders of magnitude!
@@adamwebster1666 It's actually fairly slow. More pathways decreases the limits on speed, rather than the inverse. The reason we design computers using generally a single shared bus is because it's very easy to keep the whole system synced to a single clock cycle. If you have multiple paths a signal can take based on the direction of the target device, and these paths are not connected to each other, you start running into issues where part A is running at a slightly different speed than part B, and things like CPU's heavily rely on devices finishing at predictable and deterministic times, even if it may slow the processor down a bit.
If you think a thought but have nowhere to transmit or store it, did you think anything at all? Think carefully, the answer has several startling implications.
@@NickyDiesel if life exists in the universe, and the universe ends in heat death from entropy, did life ever matter at all? The answer to both questions is yes As for the noise thing, the laws of thermodynamics demand that matter and energy be conserved, and when the tree snaps some of that energy is turned into 'noise' and released, and again when the tree hits the forest floor. Noise does indeed happen, the falling tree has only lead us to the end of the universe that much faster
This appears to be a gross misunderstanding of what a "bit" is, a bit is 0 or 1, you cannot express a single letter with a bit, you would need at least 5 bits (32 possibilities) to be able to process a single letter of the Latin alphabet and you would need at least 6 bits (64 possibilities) if some letters were uppercase and others were lowercase, so if this were true it would take us at LEAST 0.6 seconds to read a letter and then multiply that by the number of letters and you would very quickly find out the math doesn't math. For example, so far this comment is 685 letters long and would therefore take over 6 minutes to read. Did it take you over 6 minutes to read my comment?
Oh and the best part of this analogy is that you wouldn't be able to process the information while reading it, my above comment would take 6:51 to read into your memory, at which time you could BEGIN to process the information and look at things like words, phrases, and eventually meaning. I really don't think they should have used the word bits, even 10 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits) would be unrealistic. My phone can process about 76 billion bits per second, which according to this would mean my phone can outthink almost all humans on the planet combined, which is just absurd. They need to use better terminology, because I doubt they actually mean bit in the computer terminology, but that is what people will take away from this.
Thinking that the richest man in the world is dumb is pretty comedic, too. You people are delusional. I'm not saying he's a genius, but you could not possibly get to that level of wealth (regardless of what help you've had) without having at least a somewhat above average iq... but hey, whatever helps you sleep at night little buddy.
Also records for all time how much of a hater they are and that Musk lives rent free in their heads. A century from now, people will make Did You Know videos about it where no one even mentions the scientists.
I'm curious what they mean by "bits", because a computer bit is just a symbol for the on/off state of a particular circuit. The human brain processes more then on/off states; we have levels of excitement, weights or biases in nuron activity, and chemocal hormones that effect those processing weights. A single human bit can as few as ten to as many as a million computer bits.
Iirc they use a bit as a unit of individual thought/information. So thinking of the word "dog" isn't several bits to encode it, but just 1 bit of information.
Hmmm, not entirely, there are bit, then there are Bits. Both of them look similar, but both are different sizes a bit is one off or on switch, but bits is usually one group of bit, so bit is one but 10bits is the same thing, and I come to the conclusion after I did the research that I am going to make this a test and see who reads the entire thing and who goes "well no" I was thinking of Bytes and bytes used in java for script writing. So in conclusion this was useless info I thought i needed to share for everyone day to be a bit better.
Googled it, it's from a paper in Neuron which is a peer reviewed journal. I'll read the paper when I get to my computer because it's locked behind a paywall so I need to log in through my uni
I think the 10 bits per second is talking about conscious thought because the consciousness is only 5% of the mind. (There is still a large part of the unconscious part if the mind for a lot of things like memory, math, planning, and so much more which we usually associate with the conscious)
A good Morse Code operator can send information much faster than is explained in the video. It's called having a good fist. Especially if he/she is using a bug rather than a much slower straight key. FYI: when you "speak" in Morse Code, say "dit" for the dots and "Dah" for the dashes. More accurate.
yeah the study is pretty bunk it basically just looked at haw fast some people type it estimated about 120 words a minute and jumped to the conclusion we think in 10 bits
What is meant with the speed of thought, is it creating sentences in your mind, visualizing shapes in your mind, computing numbers, is it planning into the future? What kind of thought is it, or is it just everything averaged out.
How can we send a code faster than we can think? How can we transcribe a code coming in faster than we can think? Not only are we thinking of what we are sending, but we are thinking of how to send it. This does not add up.
I think it's scientific fraud. You won't be able to comprehend speech or read at such speed. Even if we assume that pattern matching for words is completely unconscious and it's not.
I think whats going on is that the 10 bits is for the conscious thoughts and actions. Doing something like sending Morse code or really anything actually has lots of unconscious actions behind it that we dont think about. Walking, talking, anything is carried out largely by muscle memory type stuff.
You can talk without thinking of how to sound out each vowel. A lot of what you do (including morse code) is trained response. Instead of typing out a command to perform an action, you’re copy-pasting pre-existing bits of commands to perform an action. Inevitably faster. And subconscious.
Actually the naming most likely is a homage and a reference to the fact Musk himself often describing human intelectual capabilities in terms of bits per second. He basically was one of if not the 1st person to make this analogy well known during his speeches about Neuralink.
@@TheUltimegaManElon just employs the people who do and profits from their work. You think someone who does a nazi salute thrice infront of everyone is mentally stable enough for building rockets?
I’m fairly certain that the 10 bits per second is talking about a different process than you might be assuming. The brain as a whole can process more than 10 bits per second, as evidenced by Morse code operators, who transmit and receive more information than that. The 10 bits must be referring to some internal thought process that is more specialized. Maybe it’s the speed of creative thought? I’m not really sure.
Bruh just mentioned the discrepancy that exists between the 10 bits per second conclusion and the billions of bits per second that bombard our senses, with nothing more to go on any more conclusions are just speculation.
Think about what Morse code operators do. They repeatedly do a single message over and over again until it is received. The thing is, even though that transmission is faster than 10 bits, the human receiving the message isn't processing that information at the rate given by the operator. Basically the one thing everyone on here seems to be forgetting is that you need both a source and an observer to calculate the rate of information transfer.
My understanding is the "slow" part are the visualization part of our thought. Like taking computer for example, they only require little processing to understand simple binaries but to output the data to a screen and visualize them take a toll. For our thought to transform into language it would greatly slow down the process
@@DoctorProph3tI mean... The fact that our senses are sending info at way more speeds than that, it only makes that the brain as a whole can process the information at those speeds.
I'd assume it's that each operation within a single localized chain of neurons has a 10 bits per second information transfer rate. But our brain is made of tons of these things. Or maybe it's referring to conscious thoughts, which... yeah, no, I can buy that. You do a *bunch* of stuff subconsciously. Heck, once you form the habits even walking is an automatic process, you just decide where.
I remember another researcher some time ago say that our brains complete 100 million-billion calculations per second. I have always been fond of that notion! The "clock" speed might not be high, but the massive parallelism makes up for it. But if there is a limit, it has to do with energy (glucose/oxygen supply) and maintenance (consistent prolonged sleep).
Thinking takes too much energy because it has to rewire the brain, so having automatic responses for information is more cost efficient. It's much easier to "think" in our sleep when we don't need to pay attention to what we're thinking.
That and we are thinking in terms of how a computer processes information. But in reality, the decision making process is incredibly complex, even if it is considered 'slow'. But a computer cannot independently decide what mathematical equation to use for a particular problem through a multistep process accurately unless specifically programed to do so, nor can a computer program itself properly (our learning algorithms have proven that over and over again).
@goldenhate6649 Well yeah, our computers don't have the ability to write their own code and to self improve. At any rate, yeah it's much faster to have an answer that's close enough to accurate to the specifics without having to verbally walk through the entirety of the situation.
I’m pretty sure that 10 bits per second statistic is not including a lot of brain activity, so I would be interested in seeing how that number was obtained. It’s also worth mentioning that brain activity is very energy intensive, so naturally we evolved to take as many shortcuts as possible, meaning the operations that do happen are very significant.
the shape of thought is a lot like an inkblot, it's simply shifting as we think, scary how simplified things become for us to understand them, vast concepts essentially undergo human compression to be stored in our minds
I think a good possibility is extreme compression. Those 10 bits are full of information. Combined with the fact this may possibly be only conscious thought and you get a a possible millions out of only 10 bits per second.
If I were to guess, I would say most of the processing is done through the nervous system. Also, it might be less a limitation of our brain and more a limitation on our "cooling system." The stronger the processor, the cooler you need to keep it. Our brain might be limiting itself to protect itself from overheating.
@@sharky3177You should get that checked out, if you havent already, never heard of that before, so my condolances or congrats, depending on if youre dying or a supergenius.
No, our brain isn't even close to needing to worry about our neurons overheating, as shown by our nervous system. They're not really saying much of anything here. Like what do they mean "bit" in the sense of the brain
I actually noticed that not that long ago while studying and practicing for some ATC tests. When looking at reactive tests involving perspective left and right and objects in space, and a short time limit, I got frustrated at my inability to process this basic info faster. I only got better at the test by NOT thinking, and simply glancing and answering within the 2s window.
The thing is, conscious thought is an INCREDIBLY complex concept. While on paper thinking about the word “Penguin” is simple, the actual amount of connections that your brain has to make to process what that word means, how it’s spelled, how it sounds, what a penguin looks like, and whatever else you know about them is UNIMAGINABLE. Even relatively simple features of language and communication are still so complex that we are not directly aware of any other species on Earth that can communicate to the effectiveness as humans while even being capable of communicating abstract concepts instead of physical ones. Even what we typically see as simple is an evolutionary wonder.
If you speak your stream of consciousness at 150 words per minute, then put it into a good text compressor that compresses it down to 10 bits per word, you get about 20-25 bits per second. If you edited down the stream of consciousness to remove filler words and irrelevant stuff, and used a theoretically optimal text compression, 10 bits per second is possible.
Theres actually a really cool horror short story about this called "if youre armed at the glenmont metro, please Sh**t me." Creep cast did an episode on it. Highly recommend :)
I was under the impression that we had so many neurons because each path from one neuron to any other neuron was a thought, thought process or potential thought process and pruning happened to allow certain thoughts to be accessed easier with less potential confusion.
I think that is correct. I think the implication here might be that each conscious access of a synapse chain is a bit maybe? The whole definition of a “bits” applied to a human brain makes things weird. Humans aren’t digital after all, and probably are more like some weird analog quantum hybrid considering we are electrical potential + weird hormone wizardry.
Have you heard of the Neuralink? Basically, Musk believes we can get chips embedded in our brains to help us think faster. According to this study, that wouldn't work.
Isn't it just based on how fast we talk or perceive thoughts? because if you don't need to talk or follow images to think you do it in an instant, which is just knowing something. Basically it is because thinking itself is acquiring/constructing new information, so you could compare our Brains capability to a fast Train on tracks and thinking to building the tracks in front of your train as you go.
Is that 10 bits as in language based information? Because if you were to think of a picture in your head, that is more than 10 bits of data. And what about the processing our brains do for automatic functions? Wouldn’t those be processing bits too. Sometimes I feel like scientists put out information like this to get attention.
And how your brain stores learned actions, including words and phrases in your synapses rather effectively. Consider how much the word “cat” holds in meaning in your mind, and (in english) it’s only three letters and one syllable. And yet it dredges up an oceans worth of information upon recalling it.
Great part of that "limit" is caused by your language. If you learn how to think without using your mental voice, using only the general idea of things, you can think waaay faster. You start to think really fast , but then need some time to convert the conclusion into words. It's nice for logic problems like tactics and investigation, but not so good for debates (if you don't have much time to think before answering). The technique is quite simple, but require some meditation to be attained, as you need to know how to clean your mind, then train to only consider the "feeling" about things and to not evoke their name. For an example, think about the idea of "hat" with the challenge to think about one that could hide a camera inside without making it suspicious. If you think with words, it will take some time, but with just feelings you'll have a massive brainstorm of all kinds of hats you know about and theirs forms, doing a fast trial and error like a hacker or easily think about the right one by filtering all kinds of hats by their form, in 3D.
Or is each area of the brain doing 10 bits/sec simultaneously so it’s closer to hundreds or thousands/sec in total. Plus were these brains scanned while the person was calm and relaxed? When your brain feels the pressure, it at least feels like it’s going faster
Full video on this please, my guess would be those bits are carrying high level "meaning" and not individual data points like our senses. Like compressed files being computed on
This must be extremely misleading. A quick Google search says the average word is composed of 32-64 bits. We process multiple words per second, so how does thought only move at 10 bps?
I read about this the other day. Words don't really contain that much information. You can often predict the next letter with pretty good accuracy. Each letter really only contains about 1 bit of information - it could be that letter or a different letter, and it's not likely to be anything else.
What's the measure used in this experiment? Because if it's "human presses a button" that's probably because a Morse code message isn't even that different from writing an email
I always kinda assumed that our brains put the breaks on to prevent overstimulation and saturation from too much coming on at any given moment. Have you ever seen a cat losing their mind because there's too many noises, smells, movement and activity happening at once? That could have been us trying to climb the walls and hissing at the drapes.
Am an Autistic with ADHD and Epilepsy. And experience frequent migraines. Can confirm this is in fact, true. Your brain has limits for a reason. And they are very, very good reasons. 💀👍
I imagine not all actions require "thinking" like if I was learning to use Morse code, I'd probably be pretty slow and slower than 10bps as I'd have to think about each dot and dash. Once it's learned, that process becomes more automatic. Just My guess tho.
@@rose_no maybe? I wonder if they consider the rate of 10 thoughts per second as a measure of executive functioning / working memory. The more proficient we are with a task, the less cognitive load it takes to perform said task. Maybe it's more akin to zip files on a computer? The more proficient a person becomes the more that data becomes condensed for sake of efficient data transfer across a finite bandwidth capacity.
When you produce morse code you aren't thinking about each bit individually. You've memorized the sequence that each character maps to, and you transmit those sequences one after another.
Its stupid to compare a brain to bits, for reference a single colored pixel takes 24 bits, so are you saying it takes over 2 seconds for humans to thing of a blue?
No, your senses process things much faster. The 10 bits per second is for conscious thought. Watch the video before commenting. It's not even that long.
One of those infinite scenarios when asking the right question the wrong way leads to conclusions that can be proved wrong with a millionth of an effort that went into the study.
This is either straight up wrong, or measured in an incredibly unreasonable way. I mean, if you can come up with more than 1,25 letters in a second you think faster than 10 bits per second.
That seems absurdly low. I can think of something I have seen before in detail far exceeding 10 bits in well under a second. Think of any photograph you have taken. How many bits is that? Now picture that photograph in your mind. How long did that take? I'm guessing that resulting bit rate is way higher than 10/sec. They are either using a non standard definition of a bit. Some sort of biological bit (still doesn't really make sense since neurons fire at a rate of 5-50 activation per second) as opposed to an electronic one. Or they are referring to a very specific type of thinking.
Yea, I feel like this and everything I could find on it are very poorly worded. Because it's obviously not true unless they mean something like "Conscious decision making only processes 10 units of information every second." Like, a single neuron can fire up to 1000 times a second I believe.
@@Quintonias it's not though? Peak human reaction time is like 150ms, that's .15 seconds. Even at three times slower, you're still looking at .45 seconds, which is still under half a second.
This discrepancy sounds more like someone missed a decimal point somewhere than an actually true fact if you have a billion bps your brain must process faster than that or you wouldn't experience the things you do in real time
Right? They must be using a very specific definition of "thought", a very narrow subset of what our brains are actually doing every second. Either that, or the data is just wrong.
Have you ever tried thinking not in letters/words, but in conecpts/images? The "10 bits per second" - is it the speed of the "internal monologue" that most people percieve as "thinking"? And how about "sortring out all the unneccesary for making decision" bits of informations? What about the structuring all the million bit information into a solid state realiry outside of our brain? What about all the automated bodily functions? The 10 bits per second - is just how we "talk" information to others, so others people will be able to percept that information. That is a speed of how an avarage human exchange information with another human. Most probably that is the speed of how parants teach their child to speak. ...I`ve developed so many inhumane experiments about how the conciouness work, including the experiment on children. Indocrtination, mind control, idea virus, perception corruption. What scares me the most is that with inplementation of AI - all this can be done without human even realising it.
Why does 10 bps work so well? Analog processing (not being limited to single input or single output structures), Parallelization, asynchronous operations, multiple simultaneous clock speeds, distributed communication, and specialization of systems capable of doing multiple complex tasks in one operation. Also a critical component is out of order data retrieval, preemption, processing, and even out of order results (the ability for our brain to process partial information first and then later rewrite our own memory to fill in the details as resources are available). In many ways analog systems are far superior, and considerably more efficient, when compared to digital ones. In our digital systems we have to remove all these complexities to make the system manageable. We have to lock the system down to rigid strictly defined rules to stay consistent. The brain does not have those problems, it regulates all that with ease, and adapt and alter operations when it needs to.
the issue is not that we think slowly it is that we consider things that are groups of choices made as singular thoughts. to what degree of our knowledge is being accessed and considered to create those individual choices that make up the chunks of choices we are talking about.the question should be what is a thought unconsciously thought and what is a thought consciously thought and measure the difference.
I'm betting that number is based on assumptions about how we process data. Like it was ascii code and we process words in that format. But I can read faster than that. I can talk faster than that. Obviously they have incorrect assumptions. The way we think is often images or concepts that can't be rendered as ascii code or some equivalent.
I read the whole article this is referencing. The point isn't so much that "thought" only happens in ten bits per second, but rather that cognition only happens that fast. Basically, we're free to act based on sensory inputs and pre-loaded knowledge at a faster pace because we can very easily compress that data into a form interpretable by our brains. For example, speaking. You don't think about the intricacies of speech while doing it, you just say what you intend to say, and doing so processes billions of bits through your mind and spews them out into the world in an audio format. Cognition, however, is specifically thinking about something. It breaks the process down into steps beyond the "machine language" that your neurons are accustomed to firing in to act automatically, which is why it's so much slower. Tl;dr most of the stuff you do on a daily basis is the meat-computer version of a ZIP file.
You gotta remember that our brain activity is, at it's most basic, chemicals telling nerve cells to release chemicals that tell nerve cells to release chemicals and so on.
This largely relies on the idea that a thought is nothing more than a few bits, whereas the complexity and meaning of the words that make up the thought alone are a large number of bits if a computer were to handle it. The act of speaking, hearing or thinking and understanding who, what, where, when, and why of the dialog is a VAST amount of information that we process all the time.
It might also come from the way we experience life, like we experience things at constant speed so we just think in that speed. You can think faster if you try but u will have to get used to it
I can visualize, in my head, in real time, like a movie, running through a 15th century castle, being chased by vampires, while the moon shines through the window and reflects on the night ocean outdoor while symphonic music is playing. If that's 10 bits per second....
The only thing i can picture actually processing at that speed is our language processing, where realistically we tend to have a set cadence that is pretty much universal, yes some languages might have more sounds per word but the lamguage gets spoken faster to a relatively matched words per minute to other languages
Oh I had actually thought about this before. Because processing at a slower rate leads to better solutions. We have to analyze risks in future events that has not even happened yet, so in order to do that, we slow down time in our brains. In fact, AI replicates this. When AI rushes answers, it leads to more incorrect results, but when you tell it to take its time and analyze more carefully, more processing is used. This limit is imposed by how well you can adapt with the information you have, and the experience you uncovered in those scenarios.
The important distinction is that this is our conscious thoughts. Our subconscious thoughts are much faster. We can evaluate complex situations and make decisions about them in less than a second, which definitely requires more than ten bits to do.
The bits are “RELEVANT” bits though! It’s probably like asking a question to millions of people and then tallying the vote and processing the result. You only need a simple answer to say what the result is but the processing to get there is enormous. Fight/flight, do/ditch, remember/forget kind of results.
Please define "thinking" in this context. Conscious reaction to impulse? Unconscious reaction to impulse? Processing information? Recalling short term memory? Recalling long term memory? Or the combination of those?
honestly with how much information our body receives each second from external sources and internal within our own bodies its def not a bad thing to have that information slowed down enough for the brain to be able to handle it since it would just be too much for us to handle consciously.
Imagine those nerves just working as fast as they can to get the information to the brain only for the brain to take 10 neuron years to make a decision and then say: The council has decided......We are nervous
While 10 bits/s is probably the rate of the thoughts' output stream, the behind-the-scenes processing might be actually much more. Think of it like this: To create the next word, an LLM with the processing power of a fraction of our brains has to access and process a huge space of data in order to come up with something moderately intelligent.
Because bottleneck is chemical receptors in the brain. Neurons may work at speed of light, but then they meet with the wall called "speed of sound in a liquid" that the bottlenecks have. So it's the speed we have to bear.
If there is a limit it is probably to prevent our brain cells from 1. tearing themselves apart 2. overheating 3. Not exhausting too much energy and needing to recover by sleeping more often.
It’s really weird. I always notice it when I’m talking in my head it’ll go. I can talk about as fast as I normally do but the longer I keep talking the slower it is in my head.
This is clearly not the whole picture. And when in emergencies if there is a limit like this it is removed, which is why time seems to go in slow motion and our brains retain more detail during an emergency.
Computers process “bits” as binary 1s and 0s, humans process “bits” as collectives, which is why you can imagine the full meaning of a sentence in your head much faster than you can speak or even think the words themselves.
Brain does a lot more then just think. There are functions to keep our body working and translate sensory information into domething we can understand. Processing thoughts is processing immediate and important information, but also going trough memories. It is likely that the library of information is slow to access and requires time to think. Brain also goes trough all the experiences while dreaming. But brain can also be quick and you can think very fast if it is necessary, but the quality of your choises go down as you have less time to think. However trough experience it is easier to do many things, including fast thinking.
Everything is happening at 10 bits a second but we are also running hundreds of programs at once, most of which run in the background and we don't even realize we are thinking
The brain is a massively parallel processor. Yes, your executive function - your attention - is only on one thing, and it goes about 10 bits per second, I think we can all attest. Each of your senses, their processing systems, and the entire sympathetic and parasympathetic homeostatic network is all running in the background at around the same speed. It all integrates together flawlessly, and we call it consciousness, and we don't notice that we're living a few milliseconds in the past until we read it for the first time or enter a deep meditation.
This is definitely one of those "we proved that bumblebees can't fly" circumstances where they're not asking the right questions and coming to a conclusion that is painfully easy to disprove.
The researchers are daft. Our thoughts are not the equation. They are the output. They are the e of the mc2. They are the answer 42 to the question that is everything. They are the graph that holds an infinite number of points upon its line.
That's always been a misconception, mainly by people pushing anti-science narratives.
The whole "bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly when they obviously can" thing was used as an example of how either we didn't know something about physics or about bee mechanics.
It was never scientists declairing that bumblebees couldn't fly, it was meant as an example of how we don't know everything and that there is more to learn.
As it turned out, after more research we discovered that bumblebees can fly because of the mechanics of their wings which have a very fast "double beat" mechanic that allows for greater lift.
Even Kyle's own analogy of "slower than morse code" is self-disproving....
@@JgHaverty fr… like, how did people understand morse code then? 😂
And why, when faced with certain situations, time slows. Our brains go just fast enough for daily activities, but there is a turbo button effect when needed.
I heard that the ten bits per second is conscious.Thought, and we have thousands of bits per second unconscious thought
There is a book about this, Thinking Fast and Slow.
I'd say it makes sense : people can type morse code or on a keyboard faster than that ,
So it's likely that a large chunk of it is just muscle memory
@@davidegaruti2582 great point to bring up. "Oh, you only think at 10bps", "OK and how come I output more than that?" "Uhhh..."
I wish Kyle expanded a little bit on how they claim we encode stuff into those 10 bits
but thousands of bits per seconds ain't much, unless you didn't mean it literally.
I think you meant subconsciously because unconscious means knocked out. But I agree with what you mean. He mentioned a little bit of that, our senses move faster in our ability to sense things but thinking about those senses moves very slow comparatively.
We do not think serially. We process data not only parallel, but hugely multitasking. Add on the amount of autonomous processing going on and 10 bits per sec is just a "researcher illusion".
that teacher that always goes on about how multitasking is not real
Yeah. Personally, I think there is a huge difference between the conscious thoughts we have where we codify ideas, feelings, actions and objects with language, taking several seconds and when I just imagine the situation and the possible feelings in what seems like an instant. Try to think about going for ice cream. But use no words, think about the actions of going there, waiting in line, ordering, paying, eating, but not like a movie- just visualize situation. That's waaay faster than when you just do math, for example. Computers are really fast at doing math and solving logical puzzles, but our intelligence seems to work a lot better at solving problems so complex, using math to have more precision makes us less efficient. Which makes sense for the evolution of mammals.
I can argue there's pre-computation going on and then some optimization in the brain itself. So the 10 bit is the last part of the chain, which we can't reduce any further without compromising functionality. Assuming the 10-bit is correct.
@@jongyon7192p my reply to that teacher is to hold up my hand, wiggle all my fingers, and ask him if I had to think about every single action of my fingers individually.
There is an extensive video of veritasium as to why "multitasking" isnt real and we do in fact process data serially you couldnt be more wrong
"The Musk illusion" when you think you're smarter than you actually are.
Haha Elon Musket go bdeesh
He has brain cells he hired to outsource!
It could also be described as the Democrat illusion. Goodness gracious, people are so dumb and irrational
How is this different from dunning-krueger?
@@douglasbabb1725 in this case it's been personalized. You know, like a monogram.
Explains why I always come up with the best comebacks AFTER the argument.
Real
Yea. Our fantasy come backs. 😭
for real
10 Bits.. "Now Your Playing With Power!"
@@blackwater7183 LMAO
I'd love to know what they define as "thought" and how, if it is slower than the manual process of Morse code, then how did humans send and receive messages "faster" than their brains can process.
This is exactly my first question! I'll have to go read the paper
it's about conscious thought. The people proficient at sending/receiving Morse code do it automatically and don't have to think about each symbol
Morse code proves this isn’t right
I dont think thats where the dissconnect is...
Waves, like we can measure human brains using... are inifnite bits.
They are waves not descreet bits. They are entire functions and formulas being carried out not a binary.
@@mokjac it is right. Consider you learn to perform working through muscle memory, which will require less actual thinking. Consider reaction times, where they can be trained to be super fast. What’s happening isn’t that you’re actually reducing the speed of the electric signals coming from your senses, but your computing time to create a response. A trained response needs a lot less computation, and works my faster. Think of it this way: conscious thought is writing out a command and then sending it. Trained responses (such as morse code and speaking) are like copy pasting existing pieces of commands to create a response. Copy pasting will inevitably be faster.
Would be nice if they mentioned their metric in the abstract to their paywalled article or anywhere in the Scientific American report on it. My guess is if you have a song stuck in your head while fiddling with a pen, walking and talking, being generally aware not to bump into someone and subconsciously monitoring for alarming sounds smells or sights, then only the words coming out of your mouth are counted.
Yes because anything that is a repeatable pattern is not counted as the circuit is already activated, which required only 1 bit to operate. It's more like 10 light switches igniting many different circuits at once, and altering those circuits. So the actual amount of information needed to push these actions is very little.
Like telling a robot to move a predetermined path, only 1 bit is used to initiate the activity, and other to alter that activity to another path.
This is why babies are dumb. They don't have these pathways created so they are significantly limited on this 10 bit per second processing speed. Or when you are learning something completely new without any, even slightly related knowledge to the subject. You don't have any previous information to light up, so it feels more challenging.
The article is also on the arxiv. You don't need to breakthrough the paywall.
@Modikie You're trying to rationalise something that makes no sense. Bits per second is a measure of rate of information transfer. So there's simply no way that's true, considering we can type and speak at an even faster rate. These aren't repeated functions and require thought before the action is completed.
try sci-hub if you cant get to a paywall article
@nanayawagyen-kokuro5069 look into neuroscience. Every action we do is predicted based on prior information making things easy for us.
Try learning a skill, any skill. Why is it now so much easier to do that skill with practice? Patterns get created which become almost effortless to accomplish.
Imagine being a baby now.
Can't walk, can't do much of anything. Are babies just stupid? Well, yes but no. They're constantly gaining new information about the world they've never experienced before, while their brains are optimizing itself to adapt to this new environment. Things that would require effort and thought into, become automatically actuator out of habit and formed neural pathways.
This is how LLM's work. This is how every intelligent system works. Seriously, look into any new thing like a new software. You're not having to locate everything every time you use it, you form quick pathways in your brain to expect something to be there, based on experience.
So if the data about the brain really only working at 10 bit/s is true (which since they're the scientists and not us, that's probably the case), then maybe it's what we consider information and how we operate is incorrect. Most of your life is on autopilot, quickly picking between many billions and trillions of neural pathways to find the one that's perfect for what you're doing, right now to make it happen effortlessly. If those pathways don't exist, then it will be created at some point via necessity.
My BS detector is going crazy. If we can only think at the speed of Morse code, then sending Morse code would take up 100% of our mental capacity, which clearly isn't true
Because our brains likely process which neuron streams would be activated, 10 times per second. This means there is way more actual information being passed, we're just using it far more efficiently because we're using existing u information pathways, and switching between them at 10 times per second to decide what pathway to use next.
Thats how I understood this.
The bits wouldn't be each light bulb on a Christmas tree, but a single activation, or switch between different pathways for electricity to flow, to the overall tree. And if most systems are automatic, it requires even less processing power because you're just using single switches to activate or deactivate larger circuits, which you can switch between, at a rate of 10 bits per second. Which leads to significantly higher output.
Imagine being a baby and learning things for the first time. This is a look at what that processing speed would feel like, without the efficient patterns created through living life.
ok you try to decode 10 bits per second of morse code x3
@lizzycoax i did not catch all of that code the first time you?
I want @timmyt1234 up there to process Morse code and cook dinner or something at the same time.
Think of it this way: You make 10 decisions in 1 second, but execute millions of processes in the same second. Similarly, a computer acts when we tell it to do something, but simultaneously does millions of stuff in the background to make it happen.
My ADHD brain would probably distract me every minute if my thoughts processing would be 10x faster
I would imagine this is due to human evolution focusing heavily on automatic control we don’t need to think fast because it was more advantageous to be able to do quick movements that are either involuntary and/or automatic. Specifically the autonomic and somatic nervous systems.
Well it was mainly done for efficiency, consciously doing stuff in parallel would be horrible for efficiency as it would require a lot more energy to do so. Where the subconscious mind is efficiently created & structured in a way to do this. The conscious mind basically gets and sends information from the subconscious mind.
i have layers to my thought
The fast lane, where thousands of thoughts enter and leave at incredible speeds
the medium lane, where most of my plans and thoughts come from, still fast but slow enough to actually hear
and then my conscious thoughts, they are the slow ones, like half the speed of speaking
Came here to write this ☝🏻 so, i guess Kyle is talking about the slow one?
The slow lane is filled with all the cringeworthy embarrassing memories from your childhood and whenever you mess up
I like where your head is at, but I can promise you do not know the state of your own mind like that. Nobody does, there is far too much abstraction.
@@RygulasLolol you shouldnt make claims about how other peoples brains feel when theyre all so unknown.
@@blueteamepsilon7798 nah, they go there from your subconscious, in which they shall forever remain, always ready to hunt you in your dreams or whenever you stay late at night instead of sleeping 😂
The important detail is that we don't think all in one line, we think in parallel. That means that it's 10 bits per second across a huge portion of our brain happening individually. Also, the concepts we represent with each of those bits are MASSIVE in terms of information, but it doesn't seem like a lot because of how abstracted it is.
its more than just that... Processors and transistors have hard-wired connectivity through a single pipeline of capacity, but brains have huge interconnected and tangled masses of neurons with more bridges and connections being made all the time. 10 hertz is kinda crazy when you consider the billions of diverging and converging pathways each pulse can take.
You know what else is massive?
Those huge abstract thoughts of data also dont need to be transferred from ram into a computational core, its more like ram mutating ram in a way that computes.
Exactly. Human brain is capable of unimaginable PARALLEL workloads. Not to mention, neural pathways are governed by more than just electrical potential: theres chemical and physical aspects which expand the potential outcomes by factors. A stored memory is a combination of specific chemical markers, attachment sites and energy potentials. Increasing the CAPACITY and FLEXIBILITY by orders of magnitude!
@@adamwebster1666 It's actually fairly slow. More pathways decreases the limits on speed, rather than the inverse.
The reason we design computers using generally a single shared bus is because it's very easy to keep the whole system synced to a single clock cycle. If you have multiple paths a signal can take based on the direction of the target device, and these paths are not connected to each other, you start running into issues where part A is running at a slightly different speed than part B, and things like CPU's heavily rely on devices finishing at predictable and deterministic times, even if it may slow the processor down a bit.
"why do we think so slowly"
Every neurodivergent ever : "you're wrong".
I started scrolling through the comments to see how many people have made this point
If you think a thought but have nowhere to transmit or store it, did you think anything at all? Think carefully, the answer has several startling implications.
@@GaussianEntitydamn
@@GaussianEntityif a tree falls and nobody is around to see it, does it make a noise…?
@@NickyDiesel if life exists in the universe, and the universe ends in heat death from entropy, did life ever matter at all? The answer to both questions is yes
As for the noise thing, the laws of thermodynamics demand that matter and energy be conserved, and when the tree snaps some of that energy is turned into 'noise' and released, and again when the tree hits the forest floor. Noise does indeed happen, the falling tree has only lead us to the end of the universe that much faster
This appears to be a gross misunderstanding of what a "bit" is, a bit is 0 or 1, you cannot express a single letter with a bit, you would need at least 5 bits (32 possibilities) to be able to process a single letter of the Latin alphabet and you would need at least 6 bits (64 possibilities) if some letters were uppercase and others were lowercase, so if this were true it would take us at LEAST 0.6 seconds to read a letter and then multiply that by the number of letters and you would very quickly find out the math doesn't math. For example, so far this comment is 685 letters long and would therefore take over 6 minutes to read. Did it take you over 6 minutes to read my comment?
Oh and the best part of this analogy is that you wouldn't be able to process the information while reading it, my above comment would take 6:51 to read into your memory, at which time you could BEGIN to process the information and look at things like words, phrases, and eventually meaning. I really don't think they should have used the word bits, even 10 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits) would be unrealistic. My phone can process about 76 billion bits per second, which according to this would mean my phone can outthink almost all humans on the planet combined, which is just absurd. They need to use better terminology, because I doubt they actually mean bit in the computer terminology, but that is what people will take away from this.
I remember reading about the 2 kinds of thinking: fast & slow.
fast is more impulsive while slow is more logical.
calling the fact we are actually stupid after musk is comedic genius.
Thinking that the richest man in the world is dumb is pretty comedic, too. You people are delusional. I'm not saying he's a genius, but you could not possibly get to that level of wealth (regardless of what help you've had) without having at least a somewhat above average iq... but hey, whatever helps you sleep at night little buddy.
I love it
I think it might have to do with Neuralink though...
Also records for all time how much of a hater they are and that Musk lives rent free in their heads. A century from now, people will make Did You Know videos about it where no one even mentions the scientists.
@@oscarlundberg7462 Either it's "the effect of something considered brilliant be dumb, actually"
Or it accidentally sounds that way.
I'm curious what they mean by "bits", because a computer bit is just a symbol for the on/off state of a particular circuit. The human brain processes more then on/off states; we have levels of excitement, weights or biases in nuron activity, and chemocal hormones that effect those processing weights. A single human bit can as few as ten to as many as a million computer bits.
Could be BS, but sounds right and I can't bother to look into it myself atm.
Iirc they use a bit as a unit of individual thought/information. So thinking of the word "dog" isn't several bits to encode it, but just 1 bit of information.
@@2dozen22s But that kinda nullifies the comparison, doesn't it? You couldn't write "dog" with one bit.
Hmmm, not entirely, there are bit, then there are Bits. Both of them look similar, but both are different sizes a bit is one off or on switch, but bits is usually one group of bit, so bit is one but 10bits is the same thing, and I come to the conclusion after I did the research that I am going to make this a test and see who reads the entire thing and who goes "well no" I was thinking of Bytes and bytes used in java for script writing. So in conclusion this was useless info I thought i needed to share for everyone day to be a bit better.
Googled it, it's from a paper in Neuron which is a peer reviewed journal. I'll read the paper when I get to my computer because it's locked behind a paywall so I need to log in through my uni
Feeling like someone forgot to put an enormous asterisk on that 10bps figure, lmfao it's so ridiculous you can dismiss it off hand!
Yep, this study seems off😂
I think the 10 bits per second is talking about conscious thought because the consciousness is only 5% of the mind. (There is still a large part of the unconscious part if the mind for a lot of things like memory, math, planning, and so much more which we usually associate with the conscious)
@@gordonelmore8081 You can literally picture an image in your mind in an instant though, recall a whole memory, thats way more than 10 bits.
A good Morse Code operator can send information much faster than is explained in the video. It's called having a good fist. Especially if he/she is using a bug rather than a much slower straight key.
FYI: when you "speak" in Morse Code, say "dit" for the dots and "Dah" for the dashes. More accurate.
yeah the study is pretty bunk it basically just looked at haw fast some people type it estimated about 120 words a minute and jumped to the conclusion we think in 10 bits
This is why we need to enhance ourselves.
What is meant with the speed of thought, is it creating sentences in your mind, visualizing shapes in your mind, computing numbers, is it planning into the future? What kind of thought is it, or is it just everything averaged out.
How can we send a code faster than we can think? How can we transcribe a code coming in faster than we can think? Not only are we thinking of what we are sending, but we are thinking of how to send it. This does not add up.
the video is misleading. 10 bits per second would mean we'd take days to answer a simple question
I think it's scientific fraud. You won't be able to comprehend speech or read at such speed. Even if we assume that pattern matching for words is completely unconscious and it's not.
Yeah... doesn't make much sense
I think whats going on is that the 10 bits is for the conscious thoughts and actions. Doing something like sending Morse code or really anything actually has lots of unconscious actions behind it that we dont think about. Walking, talking, anything is carried out largely by muscle memory type stuff.
You can talk without thinking of how to sound out each vowel. A lot of what you do (including morse code) is trained response. Instead of typing out a command to perform an action, you’re copy-pasting pre-existing bits of commands to perform an action. Inevitably faster. And subconscious.
naming the concept of being slow “musk” is fucking beautiful
This
Well, all the fast thinkers aren’t making rockets to mars so…
@@TheUltimegaMan Neither is musk lmao
Actually the naming most likely is a homage and a reference to the fact Musk himself often describing human intelectual capabilities in terms of bits per second. He basically was one of if not the 1st person to make this analogy well known during his speeches about Neuralink.
@@TheUltimegaManElon just employs the people who do and profits from their work. You think someone who does a nazi salute thrice infront of everyone is mentally stable enough for building rockets?
I’m fairly certain that the 10 bits per second is talking about a different process than you might be assuming. The brain as a whole can process more than 10 bits per second, as evidenced by Morse code operators, who transmit and receive more information than that. The 10 bits must be referring to some internal thought process that is more specialized. Maybe it’s the speed of creative thought? I’m not really sure.
Bruh just mentioned the discrepancy that exists between the 10 bits per second conclusion and the billions of bits per second that bombard our senses, with nothing more to go on any more conclusions are just speculation.
Think about what Morse code operators do. They repeatedly do a single message over and over again until it is received. The thing is, even though that transmission is faster than 10 bits, the human receiving the message isn't processing that information at the rate given by the operator.
Basically the one thing everyone on here seems to be forgetting is that you need both a source and an observer to calculate the rate of information transfer.
My understanding is the "slow" part are the visualization part of our thought. Like taking computer for example, they only require little processing to understand simple binaries but to output the data to a screen and visualize them take a toll. For our thought to transform into language it would greatly slow down the process
@@DoctorProph3tI mean... The fact that our senses are sending info at way more speeds than that, it only makes that the brain as a whole can process the information at those speeds.
I'd assume it's that each operation within a single localized chain of neurons has a 10 bits per second information transfer rate. But our brain is made of tons of these things. Or maybe it's referring to conscious thoughts, which... yeah, no, I can buy that. You do a *bunch* of stuff subconsciously. Heck, once you form the habits even walking is an automatic process, you just decide where.
Depends if I'm gaming or not.
Else I'm just in energy save mode. Foods expensive.
Ha! True that. If I'm not in a crisis situation, I'd like to keep my stream of thoughts manageable, thank you very much. xD
My thinking is that we have a ton of redundancy, which, if desynched at such a small scale, would likely be catastrophic
I remember another researcher some time ago say that our brains complete 100 million-billion calculations per second. I have always been fond of that notion! The "clock" speed might not be high, but the massive parallelism makes up for it. But if there is a limit, it has to do with energy (glucose/oxygen supply) and maintenance (consistent prolonged sleep).
Thinking takes too much energy because it has to rewire the brain, so having automatic responses for information is more cost efficient. It's much easier to "think" in our sleep when we don't need to pay attention to what we're thinking.
That and we are thinking in terms of how a computer processes information. But in reality, the decision making process is incredibly complex, even if it is considered 'slow'. But a computer cannot independently decide what mathematical equation to use for a particular problem through a multistep process accurately unless specifically programed to do so, nor can a computer program itself properly (our learning algorithms have proven that over and over again).
@goldenhate6649 Well yeah, our computers don't have the ability to write their own code and to self improve.
At any rate, yeah it's much faster to have an answer that's close enough to accurate to the specifics without having to verbally walk through the entirety of the situation.
I’m pretty sure that 10 bits per second statistic is not including a lot of brain activity, so I would be interested in seeing how that number was obtained. It’s also worth mentioning that brain activity is very energy intensive, so naturally we evolved to take as many shortcuts as possible, meaning the operations that do happen are very significant.
the shape of thought is a lot like an inkblot, it's simply shifting as we think, scary how simplified things become for us to understand them, vast concepts essentially undergo human compression to be stored in our minds
I think a good possibility is extreme compression. Those 10 bits are full of information. Combined with the fact this may possibly be only conscious thought and you get a a possible millions out of only 10 bits per second.
If I were to guess, I would say most of the processing is done through the nervous system. Also, it might be less a limitation of our brain and more a limitation on our "cooling system." The stronger the processor, the cooler you need to keep it. Our brain might be limiting itself to protect itself from overheating.
I have had many a headaches and heat all over my body when I have thought too hard
@@sharky3177You should get that checked out, if you havent already, never heard of that before, so my condolances or congrats, depending on if youre dying or a supergenius.
That’s actually a very good point
i think there might lead to hallucinations because in the absent of data we as humans tend to create patterns in the outside world
No, our brain isn't even close to needing to worry about our neurons overheating, as shown by our nervous system. They're not really saying much of anything here. Like what do they mean "bit" in the sense of the brain
Sounds like that's one VERY limited subset of the whole picture, since morse code was literally transcribed by humans in WWII.
I actually noticed that not that long ago while studying and practicing for some ATC tests. When looking at reactive tests involving perspective left and right and objects in space, and a short time limit, I got frustrated at my inability to process this basic info faster.
I only got better at the test by NOT thinking, and simply glancing and answering within the 2s window.
The thing is, conscious thought is an INCREDIBLY complex concept. While on paper thinking about the word “Penguin” is simple, the actual amount of connections that your brain has to make to process what that word means, how it’s spelled, how it sounds, what a penguin looks like, and whatever else you know about them is UNIMAGINABLE.
Even relatively simple features of language and communication are still so complex that we are not directly aware of any other species on Earth that can communicate to the effectiveness as humans while even being capable of communicating abstract concepts instead of physical ones. Even what we typically see as simple is an evolutionary wonder.
If you speak your stream of consciousness at 150 words per minute, then put it into a good text compressor that compresses it down to 10 bits per word, you get about 20-25 bits per second. If you edited down the stream of consciousness to remove filler words and irrelevant stuff, and used a theoretically optimal text compression, 10 bits per second is possible.
Theres actually a really cool horror short story about this called "if youre armed at the glenmont metro, please Sh**t me." Creep cast did an episode on it. Highly recommend :)
ayy creepcast
Thanks for mentioning it! Loved the read!
I was under the impression that we had so many neurons because each path from one neuron to any other neuron was a thought, thought process or potential thought process and pruning happened to allow certain thoughts to be accessed easier with less potential confusion.
I think that is correct. I think the implication here might be that each conscious access of a synapse chain is a bit maybe? The whole definition of a “bits” applied to a human brain makes things weird. Humans aren’t digital after all, and probably are more like some weird analog quantum hybrid considering we are electrical potential + weird hormone wizardry.
Probably because that's the evolutionary "happy medium" that allowed us to survive while also minimizing energy/resource usage.
Why is it called the musk illusion
Have you heard of the Neuralink? Basically, Musk believes we can get chips embedded in our brains to help us think faster. According to this study, that wouldn't work.
Isn't it just based on how fast we talk or perceive thoughts? because if you don't need to talk or follow images to think you do it in an instant, which is just knowing something. Basically it is because thinking itself is acquiring/constructing new information, so you could compare our Brains capability to a fast Train on tracks and thinking to building the tracks in front of your train as you go.
Is that 10 bits as in language based information? Because if you were to think of a picture in your head, that is more than 10 bits of data. And what about the processing our brains do for automatic functions? Wouldn’t those be processing bits too. Sometimes I feel like scientists put out information like this to get attention.
He did mention sensory data is more than that
That is correct yes.
The keyword he used was 'conscious'
I also think this study is bogus.
I type faster than 10 bits a second.
Yeah and a single character is 8 bits, minimum, yet I'm pretty damn sure we can think up and write words of many characters in a second.
How was this determined, and with what assumptions?
Perhaps it speaks to the efficiency of the compression of the data being transmitted by our senses.
This is why it takes time to recall details of something you saw. Your conscious mind has to comb through your sensory data.
And how your brain stores learned actions, including words and phrases in your synapses rather effectively. Consider how much the word “cat” holds in meaning in your mind, and (in english) it’s only three letters and one syllable. And yet it dredges up an oceans worth of information upon recalling it.
Great part of that "limit" is caused by your language. If you learn how to think without using your mental voice, using only the general idea of things, you can think waaay faster.
You start to think really fast , but then need some time to convert the conclusion into words. It's nice for logic problems like tactics and investigation, but not so good for debates (if you don't have much time to think before answering).
The technique is quite simple, but require some meditation to be attained, as you need to know how to clean your mind, then train to only consider the "feeling" about things and to not evoke their name.
For an example, think about the idea of "hat" with the challenge to think about one that could hide a camera inside without making it suspicious. If you think with words, it will take some time, but with just feelings you'll have a massive brainstorm of all kinds of hats you know about and theirs forms, doing a fast trial and error like a hacker or easily think about the right one by filtering all kinds of hats by their form, in 3D.
Or is each area of the brain doing 10 bits/sec simultaneously so it’s closer to hundreds or thousands/sec in total. Plus were these brains scanned while the person was calm and relaxed? When your brain feels the pressure, it at least feels like it’s going faster
Full video on this please, my guess would be those bits are carrying high level "meaning" and not individual data points like our senses. Like compressed files being computed on
lossy compression
This must be extremely misleading. A quick Google search says the average word is composed of 32-64 bits. We process multiple words per second, so how does thought only move at 10 bps?
I read about this the other day. Words don't really contain that much information. You can often predict the next letter with pretty good accuracy. Each letter really only contains about 1 bit of information - it could be that letter or a different letter, and it's not likely to be anything else.
What's the measure used in this experiment? Because if it's "human presses a button" that's probably because a Morse code message isn't even that different from writing an email
I always kinda assumed that our brains put the breaks on to prevent overstimulation and saturation from too much coming on at any given moment.
Have you ever seen a cat losing their mind because there's too many noises, smells, movement and activity happening at once? That could have been us trying to climb the walls and hissing at the drapes.
Am an Autistic with ADHD and Epilepsy. And experience frequent migraines. Can confirm this is in fact, true. Your brain has limits for a reason. And they are very, very good reasons. 💀👍
I think this deserves a much deeper and longer segment
Wait, so how would people produce morse code messages if we cannot think that fast?
Pipelining and buffering, maybe. Or better encoding.
I imagine not all actions require "thinking" like if I was learning to use Morse code, I'd probably be pretty slow and slower than 10bps as I'd have to think about each dot and dash. Once it's learned, that process becomes more automatic. Just My guess tho.
@@Farenz57 …but your brain is still carrying out that entire process, so that must be some number of bits of data, right?
@@rose_no maybe? I wonder if they consider the rate of 10 thoughts per second as a measure of executive functioning / working memory. The more proficient we are with a task, the less cognitive load it takes to perform said task. Maybe it's more akin to zip files on a computer? The more proficient a person becomes the more that data becomes condensed for sake of efficient data transfer across a finite bandwidth capacity.
When you produce morse code you aren't thinking about each bit individually. You've memorized the sequence that each character maps to, and you transmit those sequences one after another.
Is it a bandwidth issue because of all the senses taking up procreasing power?
Its stupid to compare a brain to bits, for reference a single colored pixel takes 24 bits, so are you saying it takes over 2 seconds for humans to thing of a blue?
No, your senses process things much faster. The 10 bits per second is for conscious thought. Watch the video before commenting. It's not even that long.
@@XenHat he said THINK of the color blue
It takes a computer 24 bits to CREATE the colour blue, not think of it.
@@danielfriesacher2169 so what is your brain doing to project the color into your mind?
@@XenHatread his comment before commenting. He said thinking of the color blue. There are no senses involved 😂
One of those infinite scenarios when asking the right question the wrong way leads to conclusions that can be proved wrong with a millionth of an effort that went into the study.
This is either straight up wrong, or measured in an incredibly unreasonable way. I mean, if you can come up with more than 1,25 letters in a second you think faster than 10 bits per second.
Another one that doesn't understand that we have more than one neuron in our brain 🤦♂️.
That seems absurdly low. I can think of something I have seen before in detail far exceeding 10 bits in well under a second.
Think of any photograph you have taken. How many bits is that? Now picture that photograph in your mind. How long did that take? I'm guessing that resulting bit rate is way higher than 10/sec.
They are either using a non standard definition of a bit. Some sort of biological bit (still doesn't really make sense since neurons fire at a rate of 5-50 activation per second) as opposed to an electronic one. Or they are referring to a very specific type of thinking.
Considering it takes the human mind just over a second to register what's happening around them, I beliece the number has merit.
@@Quintonias that's not even true. Human reaction time is under half a second.
@@vyor8837 incorrect.
Yea, I feel like this and everything I could find on it are very poorly worded. Because it's obviously not true unless they mean something like "Conscious decision making only processes 10 units of information every second."
Like, a single neuron can fire up to 1000 times a second I believe.
@@Quintonias it's not though? Peak human reaction time is like 150ms, that's .15 seconds. Even at three times slower, you're still looking at .45 seconds, which is still under half a second.
Please video on this topic
yes please
This discrepancy sounds more like someone missed a decimal point somewhere than an actually true fact if you have a billion bps your brain must process faster than that or you wouldn't experience the things you do in real time
Right? They must be using a very specific definition of "thought", a very narrow subset of what our brains are actually doing every second. Either that, or the data is just wrong.
Have you ever tried thinking not in letters/words, but in conecpts/images?
The "10 bits per second" - is it the speed of the "internal monologue" that most people percieve as "thinking"?
And how about "sortring out all the unneccesary for making decision" bits of informations? What about the structuring all the million bit information into a solid state realiry outside of our brain? What about all the automated bodily functions?
The 10 bits per second - is just how we "talk" information to others, so others people will be able to percept that information. That is a speed of how an avarage human exchange information with another human. Most probably that is the speed of how parants teach their child to speak.
...I`ve developed so many inhumane experiments about how the conciouness work, including the experiment on children. Indocrtination, mind control, idea virus, perception corruption. What scares me the most is that with inplementation of AI - all this can be done without human even realising it.
I think words in my head at the same rate as I speak.
Naming this after a man who we all thought was super smart and ended up being about as bright as Vantablack made me cackle with laughter.
Why does 10 bps work so well? Analog processing (not being limited to single input or single output structures), Parallelization, asynchronous operations, multiple simultaneous clock speeds, distributed communication, and specialization of systems capable of doing multiple complex tasks in one operation. Also a critical component is out of order data retrieval, preemption, processing, and even out of order results (the ability for our brain to process partial information first and then later rewrite our own memory to fill in the details as resources are available). In many ways analog systems are far superior, and considerably more efficient, when compared to digital ones. In our digital systems we have to remove all these complexities to make the system manageable. We have to lock the system down to rigid strictly defined rules to stay consistent. The brain does not have those problems, it regulates all that with ease, and adapt and alter operations when it needs to.
Add the fact that Buddy Brain is on the sudoku, or other, while I go out, upon return, the puzzle is Solved.
@@JeannetteReedsomehow I understood this
the issue is not that we think slowly it is that we consider things that are groups of choices made as singular thoughts. to what degree of our knowledge is being accessed and considered to create those individual choices that make up the chunks of choices we are talking about.the question should be what is a thought unconsciously thought and what is a thought consciously thought and measure the difference.
That car sound freaked me out so bad that I twitched like a baby who just ate a lemon
That 10bit thinking speed is what made machine calculate at speeds of millions per second
I'm betting that number is based on assumptions about how we process data. Like it was ascii code and we process words in that format. But I can read faster than that. I can talk faster than that. Obviously they have incorrect assumptions. The way we think is often images or concepts that can't be rendered as ascii code or some equivalent.
If humans could think any faster, the Earth'd be dust by now.
I read the whole article this is referencing. The point isn't so much that "thought" only happens in ten bits per second, but rather that cognition only happens that fast.
Basically, we're free to act based on sensory inputs and pre-loaded knowledge at a faster pace because we can very easily compress that data into a form interpretable by our brains. For example, speaking. You don't think about the intricacies of speech while doing it, you just say what you intend to say, and doing so processes billions of bits through your mind and spews them out into the world in an audio format.
Cognition, however, is specifically thinking about something. It breaks the process down into steps beyond the "machine language" that your neurons are accustomed to firing in to act automatically, which is why it's so much slower.
Tl;dr most of the stuff you do on a daily basis is the meat-computer version of a ZIP file.
Sometimes i think slower
Sometime i think by not thinking , the idea just pops up in my head
You gotta remember that our brain activity is, at it's most basic, chemicals telling nerve cells to release chemicals that tell nerve cells to release chemicals and so on.
This largely relies on the idea that a thought is nothing more than a few bits, whereas the complexity and meaning of the words that make up the thought alone are a large number of bits if a computer were to handle it. The act of speaking, hearing or thinking and understanding who, what, where, when, and why of the dialog is a VAST amount of information that we process all the time.
I think that human brain is one of the natures most prominent "it's not a bug, it's a feature" moments
my guess is that the energy consumtion and the generated heat would be to much. also no myelin
60's :"you're using only 10%of your brain"
2025: "you're using only 10 bit per sec in your brain"
Same difference I guess...
It might also come from the way we experience life, like we experience things at constant speed so we just think in that speed. You can think faster if you try but u will have to get used to it
I can visualize, in my head, in real time, like a movie, running through a 15th century castle, being chased by vampires, while the moon shines through the window and reflects on the night ocean outdoor while symphonic music is playing. If that's 10 bits per second....
The only thing i can picture actually processing at that speed is our language processing, where realistically we tend to have a set cadence that is pretty much universal, yes some languages might have more sounds per word but the lamguage gets spoken faster to a relatively matched words per minute to other languages
Oh I had actually thought about this before. Because processing at a slower rate leads to better solutions. We have to analyze risks in future events that has not even happened yet, so in order to do that, we slow down time in our brains. In fact, AI replicates this. When AI rushes answers, it leads to more incorrect results, but when you tell it to take its time and analyze more carefully, more processing is used. This limit is imposed by how well you can adapt with the information you have, and the experience you uncovered in those scenarios.
The important distinction is that this is our conscious thoughts. Our subconscious thoughts are much faster. We can evaluate complex situations and make decisions about them in less than a second, which definitely requires more than ten bits to do.
The bits are “RELEVANT” bits though! It’s probably like asking a question to millions of people and then tallying the vote and processing the result. You only need a simple answer to say what the result is but the processing to get there is enormous. Fight/flight, do/ditch, remember/forget kind of results.
Please define "thinking" in this context.
Conscious reaction to impulse? Unconscious reaction to impulse? Processing information? Recalling short term memory? Recalling long term memory? Or the combination of those?
honestly with how much information our body receives each second from external sources and internal within our own bodies its def not a bad thing to have that information slowed down enough for the brain to be able to handle it since it would just be too much for us to handle consciously.
I think this shows moreso that we're either measuring the wrong thing or conceiving of thought itself incorrectly
Imagine those nerves just working as fast as they can to get the information to the brain only for the brain to take 10 neuron years to make a decision and then say: The council has decided......We are nervous
While 10 bits/s is probably the rate of the thoughts' output stream, the behind-the-scenes processing might be actually much more. Think of it like this: To create the next word, an LLM with the processing power of a fraction of our brains has to access and process a huge space of data in order to come up with something moderately intelligent.
Because bottleneck is chemical receptors in the brain. Neurons may work at speed of light, but then they meet with the wall called "speed of sound in a liquid" that the bottlenecks have. So it's the speed we have to bear.
"How fast is your PC?"
"About 1700000000 times faster than the speed of thought"
If there is a limit it is probably to prevent our brain cells from 1. tearing themselves apart 2. overheating 3. Not exhausting too much energy and needing to recover by sleeping more often.
I can definitely see this because sometimes I can almost feel my senses yelling at my brain for being slow-
It’s really weird. I always notice it when I’m talking in my head it’ll go. I can talk about as fast as I normally do but the longer I keep talking the slower it is in my head.
I feel like I am sometimes thinking at one bit per hour 😂
Have you talked to people that are fast but not careful thinkers? The speed at which they deviate from effectiveness is astounding.
its the law of conservation of energy
This is clearly not the whole picture. And when in emergencies if there is a limit like this it is removed, which is why time seems to go in slow motion and our brains retain more detail during an emergency.
Computers process “bits” as binary 1s and 0s, humans process “bits” as collectives, which is why you can imagine the full meaning of a sentence in your head much faster than you can speak or even think the words themselves.
Alright, next time I get a joke far too late I'll just excuse myself with this
First I need answers to "how did they measure this?", "what counts as a bit of information for neurones?" and "what counts as a thought?"
Brain does a lot more then just think. There are functions to keep our body working and translate sensory information into domething we can understand.
Processing thoughts is processing immediate and important information, but also going trough memories.
It is likely that the library of information is slow to access and requires time to think.
Brain also goes trough all the experiences while dreaming.
But brain can also be quick and you can think very fast if it is necessary, but the quality of your choises go down as you have less time to think.
However trough experience it is easier to do many things, including fast thinking.
Everything is happening at 10 bits a second but we are also running hundreds of programs at once, most of which run in the background and we don't even realize we are thinking
The brain is a massively parallel processor. Yes, your executive function - your attention - is only on one thing, and it goes about 10 bits per second, I think we can all attest. Each of your senses, their processing systems, and the entire sympathetic and parasympathetic homeostatic network is all running in the background at around the same speed.
It all integrates together flawlessly, and we call it consciousness, and we don't notice that we're living a few milliseconds in the past until we read it for the first time or enter a deep meditation.