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The speed of human thoughts is slower than previously thought

DThe results are somewhat disappointing. According to this American study published in the journal Neuron and relayed by MedicalXpress on Tuesday December 17, human thoughts have a rather… mediocre speed.

They would in fact animate on average at 10 bits per second. For comparison, a classic WiFi connection processes information at a rate of 50 million bits per second. These results are all the more strange given that the human sensory system collects data at a speed of a thousand billion bits per second. It's 100 million times faster than our thoughts.

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“This is an extremely low figure,” explains biology professor Markus Meister, one of the authors of the study. “At any given moment, we extract only 10 bits from the thousands of bits our senses perceive, and we use these 10 bits to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: what does the brain do to filter all this information? »

A paradox that could be explained by evolution

Researchers have formulated several hypotheses to understand these astonishing results and why we cannot have several thoughts at once when thousands of sensory information are flowing into our brain at the same time. And according to them, this phenomenon could be explained by evolution.

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