If you’re one of these people that likes to over-romanticize the power of the human brain, here’s some humbling information: the human brain drags ass as a processor of information when compared to the speed of your internet connection.
According to a delightfully titled study called The Unbearable Slowness of Being, published in a medical journal called Neuron, Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at Caltech, and his team calculated that the average American home’s internet speed is around 262 million bits per second. Representing the processing speed of the human brain using the same terms, the human brain would process information at a rate of only 10 bits per second. If your router was only pumping out 10 bits per second, you would chuck that thing at the nearest wall.
The researchers estimated the brain’s information flow by assessing how quickly people process information while typing. Using a 2018 study where a team of researchers from Finland analyzed 136 million keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers, Meister, and his team, used a type of math known as information theory to form a rough estimate for how the number of words typed permitted can be translated into bits per second.
Your Computer Is Finally Faster Than Your Brain
Only a small fraction of the volunteers were able to type 120 words a minute or more, a number the team would use as the high watermark for the best humans could do. Meister and his team calculated that 120 words per minute would roughly equal 10 bits a second — a woeful and pathetic number.
They figure they’re probably faster behaviors out there that would allow them to better test the brain’s processing speed. They turned to video games. The team tested the processing information of competitive gamers, whose reflexes can often be so fast that their hand movements look like a blur. The number was still 10 bits per second. In all their testing the highest bits per second they found was 11.8 and it belonged to a guy named Tommy Cherry, a speedcuber, one of those people who can solve a Rubix cube within seconds while blindfolded.
Meister argues that to be fair, the human brain has to deal with an overwhelming amount of sensory input that has to parse through just to figure out what the hell is going on. The human eye can transmit 1.6 billion bits per second. But only a little bit of that information gets processed by our brains. The discrepancy between the two requires further investigation.
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