‘The unbearable slowness of human beings: why do we live at 10 bits/s’ is not just another scientific article. As we explained to you two days ago, it was written by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister, two researchers from the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech (California Institute of Technology), and it addresses a very interesting topic: why the speed with what the human brain processes information is reduced and what is the reason why most people have difficulty carrying out more than one task simultaneously.
Zheng and Meister’s text leaves many questions open and proposes new lines of research, but this does not diminish its interest. And it does not do so because it also gives us some answers that invite the scientific community to continue investigating the behavior of the human brain and the way in which it processes information. In this last area, these two researchers give us a surprising fact: information flows through the human brain at approximately 10 bits per second.
There is a huge contrast between our sensory systems and our brain.
He leitmotif of Zheng and Meister’s article is the enormous disparity that exists between the speed at which information flows in the external and internal parts of the brain. Our sensory systems are capable of collecting external stimuli at an approximate speed, according to these scientists, of one billion bits per second. However, as we have just seen, our internal brain processes this avalanche of data at only 10 bits per second despite the fact that it brings together a third of the nearly 85 billion neurons that this complex organ has on average.
According to Zheng and Meister, the brain appears to operate in two different processing modes.
This disparity invites neuroscientists to consider what neuronal substrate establishes this speed limit in the rhythm of our existence, and also why the brain needs billions of neurons to process just 10 bits per second. At the moment, experts do not know for sure. why can we only think about one thing at a given moment. Be that as it may, according to Zheng and Meister, the brain seems to operate in two different processing modes. One of them manages the faster sensory and motor signals, while the other, for which the inner brain is responsible, processes the few bits necessary to determine behavior.
It is surprising considering the enormous complexity of the human brain, but the only possible conclusion these neuroscientists have reached is that human perception and cognition are extremely slow. This knowledge, fortunately, has applications in several very relevant challenges that neuroscience faces, such as, for example, the need to understand how learning and memory work; how human behavior evolves or what strategies scientists can resort to to further develop artificial intelligence (AI). If you want to dig a little deeper, I suggest you take a look at the original article by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister.
Imagen | Anna Shvets
More information | ScienceDirect
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