This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
i can agree at some extent why it could be at 10bits/sec.
the brain is known to do some shortcuts when parsing/speed reading but slows down when we try to extract details from written works. it is also more tiring to scrutinize details than to just read articles.
i was surprised that they got the speed measured.
The Caltech release says they derived it from "a vast amount of scientific literature" including studies of how people read and write. I think the key is going to be how they derived that number from existing studies.
Crazy how a biological analog lump is capable of even a fraction of what a brain can do.
"They also explain why we can only think one thought at a time"
I know a lot of people who would disagree with that
They would be incorrect, as this neuroscientist explains: https://drsarahmckay.com/the-myth-of-multi-tasking/
In fact, the 10 bits per second are needed only in worst-case situations, and most of the time our environment changes at a much more leisurely pace."
Bruh some tech pro is going to read this and interpret this in a terrible fashion but then again humans already change our environment.
Yet, it takes an enormous amount of processing power to produce a comment such as this one. How much would it take to reason why the experiment was structured as it was?
Information theory is all about cutting through the waste of a given computation to compare apples to apples.
I'll replicate an example I posted elsewhere:
Let's say I make a machine that sums two numbers between 0-127, and returns the output. Let's say this machine also only understands spoken French. According to information theory, this machine receives 14 bits of information (two 7-bit numbers with equal probability for all values) and returns 8 bits of information. The fact that it understands spoken French is irrelevant to the computation and is ignored.
That's the same line of reasoning here, and the article makes this clear by indicating that brains take in billions of bits of sensory data. But they're not looking at overall processing power, they're looking at cognition, or active thought. Performing a given computational task is about 10 bits/s, which is completely separate from the billions of bits per second of background processing we do.
A lion sucks if measured as a bird.
I could believe that we take 10 decisions based on pre-learned information per second, but we must be able to ingest new information at a much quicker rate.
I mean: look at an image for a second. Can you only remember 10 things about it?
It's hard to speculate on such a short and undoubtedly watered down, press summary. You'd have to read the paper to get the full nuance.
