Among the dreams of Tesla's owner is to unleash the potential of the human mind by letting it express itself through a computer. But speed doesn't seem to be one of our brain's key features
The human brain is slower than you might think, and this could complicate the outcome of technologies that connect it to external sensors to increase its capabilities, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink. These are the main conclusions of a new study according to which our brain is capable of processing just 10 bits of information per second, deciding to ignore the vast majority of the billions of bits per second sent by the sensory organs. To get an idea of the order of magnitude, a very slow wifi connection rarely transmits less than 5 megabits per second. Five million bits, or 500 thousand times what our brain can process.
The Musk Illusion
Nonetheless, many people feel like their thoughts are racing much faster than they can put into words. A (perceived) phenomenon that Elon Musk spoke about publicly in his guest appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. On that occasion, the entrepreneur defined it as “a bandwidth problem”, reiterating that among his medium-term objectives is to connect the human mind to a computer in order to be able to express thoughts without physical limits imposed by the body. This difference between perception and reality is specifically named in the study published in the journal Neuron like «Musk illusion». Neuralink is currently able to restore a certain degree of independence to paralyzed people.
The brain does not multitask
“The human brain is much less impressive than we might think,” said study co-author Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) at Scientific American. “It's incredibly slow when it comes to making decisions, and it's ridiculously slower than any device we interact with.” Furthermore, contrary to what you might think, the brain can only do one thing at a time. To calculate how fast the human brain works, Caltech researchers drew data from a large number of scientific studies relating to activities such as reading, writing, playing video games and solving the Rubik's cube.
Because the human brain is incredibly slow
The main question that emerges from the research is why our mind is so slow, given that individual neurons are much faster. But also because the brain processes a single thought at a time. The authors hypothesize that the phenomenon may have to do with the evolution of our species. The first living beings did not need to make more than one decision at the same time, and this was also the case throughout much of human history, in which the environment determined whether it was more important to eat, escape, sleep or hunt.
Cover image: ID 38562610 © Kts | Dreamstime.com
