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You don't know it, but you think as slowly as a galloping snail!

For a snail, crossing a highway is not a solution for the future. For humans, facing artificial intelligence, it will be the same thing. This comparison seems strange and yet it makes sense. Biologists from Caltech in California, USA, quantified the vitessevitesse of human thought in bits/s (a bit corresponds to a 1 or 0). And while it is often claimed that the brainbrain human is the most powerful computer in the world, the reality turns out to be surprising! Even for the most quick-witted, our brains can only process information at a speed of 10 bits per second, according to biologists. Compared to artificial data transmission systems, this is extremely slow. Wi-Fi processing, for example, is measured in hundreds of millions of bits per second.

For the human brain, this is an average. It all depends on the specific mode of information processing. In reading or writing, for example, scientists have quantified a bit as a text character. For listening to speech, it is essentially a sound.

As for writing, the researchers took a professional typist as an example. It can type at a speed of 120 words per minute, or an average of five characters per word, or 10 keystrokes, or bits, per second. When it comes to listening, the recommended rate to ensure your speech is understood is as high as 160 words per minute. Applying the same calculation, this comes to 13 bits per second.

The team then evaluated throughputs for processing more complex information. This is the case of solving the Rubik's Cube. Taking into account the world record, the bit rate would again be limited to 11.8 bits/s. For number memorization challenges, it drops to just 4.9 bits/s. To remember cards quickly, this speed peaks at 17.7 bits/s.

Paradox: why do we all live at only 10 bits/s, when the best can solve a Rubik's Cube in seconds? © SpeedCubing ClipS

An ancestral bottleneck

This “slowness” is quite surprising when we know that the “ sensorssensors “, that is to say the nervous system and the sensory organs are very powerful. Thus, a single cone photoreceptor of theeyeeye Human can transmit information at approximately 270 bits/s. This represents the equivalent of 1.6 billion bits/s per eye. For this significant amount of data to be processed, the nerfnerf optics achieves a sort of compressioncompression to reduce the throughput to 100 million bits/s. But the problem always remains the same, since the brain will cap around 10 bits/s. In the end, we only extract 10 bits from the billion that our senses capture and transmit.

How to explain this slowness? Biologists consider it to be an ancestral vestige. Originally, in a slower world, it was necessary to focus only on movementsmovements towards food and avoiding predators. These 10 bits/s were then only necessary in the most unfavorable situations.

Too bad for Neuralink

So, if we take this study into account, for those who, like Elon MuskElon Muskintend to improve their cognitive abilities thanks to AI and implantsimplants like Neuralink, this is wishful thinking. THE bottleneckbottleneck at 10 bits/s will always be the same regardless of the power of the machine supposed to improve our thinking. The fact remains that AIs do not have these constraints and they risk putting us out of the game in certain areas and in particularuniverseuniverse transport. While road infrastructure and carscars are designed around individuals whose data processing speed is on average 10 bits/s, leaving control to autonomous carsautonomous carsthe infrastructure could be completely transformed for these machines equipped with cognition at one kilobit/s. In these conditions, the snail that we are should move away from road infrastructures as pedestrians.

Of course, this study has its limitations, because human “bits” and computer bits are not identical and the quantificationquantification in bits for each human activity remains difficult to evaluate. However, the trend is there and this limitation of the human brain makes you think… At least, as slowly as it can.

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