Scientits discover how many bits per second the human brain can process

The human brain is truly and incredible piece of wetware that even the smartest of researchers have yet to fully understand, but when it comes to speed researchers have found the human brain is quite slow, especially compared to something as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi or a phone call from a smartphone.

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According to new calculations that were published in a recent entry into the scientific journal Neuron, the human brain processes a thought at just 10 bits per second, which is remarkably slow when compared to an average Wi-Fi connection in the US being capable of 260 million bits per second, or even a simple phone call at approximately 64,000 bits per second.

To arrive at this number the team looked at feats of human achievement and applied methods from the field of information theory, and what they found was even mentally intensive activities that are blended with minimal physical movement barely breached the 10 bits per second mark.

For example, a typist achieving 120 words per minute still equates to 10 bits per second of thought, while a speedcuber, the practice of being blindfolded, presented with a randomized Rubix cube and then being timed on its completion, equates to 12 bits per second. While the processing speed of the brain may be extremely slow, or at least according to the numbers in the study, the speed of sensory systems in the human body are extremely quick, with the report stating tens of billions of bits can be filtered by our sensory system per second. An example would be a single human eye being capable of processing 1.6 billion bits per second.

"Nature, it seems, has built a speed limit into our conscious thoughts, and no amount of neural engineering may be able to bypass it. Why? We really don't know, but it's likely the result of our evolutionary history," said Tony Zador, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who was not involved with the research

"It's a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is. If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow," study co-author Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, tells Carl Zimmer of the New York Times