The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627324008080%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

by sebg • 2 years ago

296 309 2 years ago

cell.com

cebert• 2 years ago

Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.

Going on a limb here, but perhaps we shouldn’t modify biological composition of the human brain.

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 2 years ago

They're not talking about changing the brain. They're talking about remedying the lack of a plausible explanation.

thegeomaster• 2 years ago

I think the parent commenter was making a joke.

ayongpm• 2 years ago

Interesting summary, where can I get the full text?

sebg• 2 years ago

Oops - my bad - here’s the arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

nusl• 2 years ago

It's 1⁢0^9 bits/s. Your title is wrong.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢0^9 bits/s.

The title appears to be accurate?

mxfh• 2 years ago

Just for playing any sport the accuracy to instruct 100s of muscles to work in a certain way is certainly above that 10bits,

Pointing out positions in a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cubic volume seems to possible significantly faster than 1/s.

The slower examples listed in the table all have some externalities like a motor/object manipulation feedback loop overhead (speed cubing) and or redundacy and are not optimized for pure information density, so I have no idea why they settled on that average, and not the optimum?

Object Recognition and Reading are already at ~50 bits.

https://arxiv.org/html/2408.10234v2#S3

luka598• 2 years ago

arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

tetris11• 2 years ago

Really fun paper. I especially enjoyed this section:

Based on the research reviewed here regarding the rate of human cognition, we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s. Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition

capitainenemo• 2 years ago

It might be though that even though our processing rate is limited to 10 bits per second, shortening the communication loop between the helper AI and the human might allow the human to switch subjects more productively by getting faster feedback. The human would be in an executive approval role like the lead character in Accelerando with their agents, assuming they trusted their agents to be delegated to.

lccerina3• 2 years ago

This is such a bad paper. Almost all calculations and equations look like some back of envelope calculation. A decent researcher would have provided some tests to their hypotheses.

GeoAtreides9• 2 years ago

The numbers cited and used in calculations are supported by citations. The purpose of this paper is not to test a hypothesis, or to gather new data, but to think about existing data and new directions of research. This is spelled out in the paper's abstract, which is kind of summary of the whole paper, useful to get a very quick idea about the paper's purpose -- expanded further in the paper's introduction and re-visited again in the paper's conclusion.

lccerina3• 2 years ago

Thank you for explaining what an abstract is... The fact that those number come from a citation doesn't make them true. This is a badly written paper that a decent researcher wouldn't have written (and I know that the author has many papers, I am speaking about this one) and a decent reviewer would have rejected. A paragraph about Elon Musk? Guesstimates on information rates? As a blog post would have been okay-ish, as a scientific paper is quite bad.

nis0s5• 2 years ago

It seems this analysis is incorrectly assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, which isn’t what happens.

GeoAtreides9• 2 years ago

I have read the paper and your thesis, that the analysis is assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, is incorrect.

nis0s5• 2 years ago

They say this directly in section 7.2,

In contrast, central processing appears to be strictly serial…

and then they proceed to give misinterpretated evidence of serialization because they’re making assumptions about lower level biochemical behavior based on higher level tissue performance. In fact, that tissue-level behavior isn’t correctly described either.

cabirum• 2 years ago

thinker can access about 220 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted

Huh, no? No one is able to think about million items in a few seconds.

The 20q thinking process involves bringing an incomplete set of abstract categories and asking a question that divides these categories into two halves (binary search). You don't even start from scratch, using previous experience (cache) to reuse whatever worked best the last time.

aithrowawaycomm• 2 years ago

I think the authors are using information theory to inappropriately flatten the complexity of the problem. On one hand we have “bits” of pre-processed sensory measurement data, then on the other hand we have “bits” of post-processed symbolic data: in many cases directly so via human language, but that would also include “the Terran unit moved a short distance” as a compact summary of a bunch of pixels updating in StarCraft. This even extends to the animal examples: the 10 bits/s figure applies to higher-level cognition. The crucial difference is that the sensory bits can be interpreted via the same “algorithm” in a context-independent way, whereas the higher-level cognition bits need their algorithms chosen very carefully (perhaps being modified at runtime).

So I am just not sure why 10 bits/s of symbolic data processing is especially slow in the first place. We don’t have a relevant technological comparison because none of our technology actually processes data in that fashion.

nis0s5• 2 years ago

When compared directly to the 10^9 bits/s for sensory information, which uses the same type of information, it is slow.

aeonik2• 2 years ago

It's more like quantum information theory isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information

kbelder• 2 years ago

I'm running a chat LLM on my local pc. It spits out text just slightly faster than I can type, but it is using much of my CPU and redlining my GPU.

Is it processing at a dozen bits per second, or hundreds of millions?

If the text the LLM generates is "that is true", can I consider that one bit of information?

I agree, they're artificially simplifying the framing of the question to generate a lower number than is sensible.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

Why not? Processing an input of 10^9 bits, making sense of all of that, and contrast it against all your existing knowledge have an output speed 10 bits/s? It is not so bad. At least if we were really processing all that information in the same way.

It had to be enough to let us survive, in the context of the challenges we faced through most of our evolution. We took a lot of shortcuts and trims there, that is why we have a system 1 and system 2 in place, with a lot of builtin cognitive biases because of that.

crazygringo3• 2 years ago

Where do they get 10 bits/second?

Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output.

And when I consider the amount of sensory information that I consciously process (not that comes in, but that I conceptually analyze), it's got to be way higher.

10 bits/s doesn't pass the smell test.

GeoAtreides9• 2 years ago

The response to the question of "where do they get 10 bits/second" can be found in the paper, in great detail if I might add.

crazygringo3• 2 years ago

I don't have access. Nor do most of us here probably. Can you share for us then?

t-writescode• 2 years ago

I was iterating over the different citations for bitrate, at least some of them, like Starcraft and the Rubik's cube, are literally a Guinness Book of Records that's a tiny blurb about APMs and a video of a guy solving the rubik's cube.

Going from APM and/or image wiggling to "bits per second" is .... hilariously reductive and I struggle to consider this response to be woefully incomplete at convincing this reader.

And yeah, my immediate response to reading the title was "where the hell are they getting that number", so I have gone and looked and am unsatisfied.

wat100009• 2 years ago

English is about one bit per letter. If you type at a very fast 120WPM then you’re right at 10bps. Computers just don’t represent English very efficiently, even with gzip.

formerly_proven2• 2 years ago

English is about one bit per letter.*

* when whole sentences or paragraphs are considered.

esperent3• 2 years ago

English is about one bit per letter

Where did you get that number from? How would you represent a letter using 1 bit?

samatman• 2 years ago

Even very fast typists are unable to do stenography without a machine specialized to the task. Speech, in turn, can usually be understood at two or even three times the rate at which it is ordinarily produced. Meanwhile, I can read several times faster than I can understand speech, even at the highest speedup which I find coherent.

Ergo, 10 bits per second just doesn't hold up. It's an interesting coincidence that a reasonably fast typing speed hits that rate, but humans routinely operate on language at multiples of it.

codedokode4• 2 years ago

What if you are typing not an English text, but a series of random letters? This gets you to 5-6 bits per letter.

ComplexSystems3• 2 years ago

These letters are jointly distributed, and the entropy of the joint distribution of a second of "plausible" English text is much lower than the naive sum of the marginal entropies of each letter. In fact, with LLMs that report the exact probability distribution of each token, it is now possible to get a pretty decent estimate of what the entropy of larger segments of English text actually is.

esperent3• 2 years ago

From the paper:

Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.” The game ‘Twenty Questions’ has been popular for centuries1as a thinking challenge. If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 220≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less.

andersource• 2 years ago

If the questions were pre-determined, which they're usually not. Reminds me of Huffman coding and the reason that compression challenges measure submissions looking at artifacts required to run them in addition to compressed size. I tend to agree with OP that this doesn't pass the smell test

largbae• 2 years ago

So, in the context of random word lookup with filter for things, we have a latency of a few seconds and a total selection of 20 bits.

Meanwhile the machinery in understanding that it is a game, processing the audio input of the question, producing the output of the answer is all taken for granted.

chongli• 2 years ago

As the answerer, if you have a wide vocabulary or if you're a technical person then it's not too difficult to routinely choose words the other person simply does not know so that no amount of yes/no questions will get them there.

Obscure medical terms (phlebotomy), names of uncommonly-known stars (Fomalhaut), obscure data structures (cache-oblivious lookahead arrays), mathematical constants (Feigenbaum's constants)... The list goes on and on!

The point I'm trying to make is that most people who play Twenty Questions aren't trying to maximize the number of bits per second in their answer. They're actually trying to play semi-cooperatively. The fun part of Twenty Questions is when the other person guesses your word with as few questions remaining as possible. Having them get all the way to 20 and then you tell them "no you were way off to guess toothache, it was actually temporomandibular joint dysfunction" makes you look rather unsporting!

Thus, since I think we can expect people who play Twenty Questions to actually try to choose a word they know the other person can guess within the space allowed, we can reasonably conclude that using the game as a way to establish some sort of rough constraint on the speed of thinking (in bits per second) is way off. In fact, I know from my own experience playing the game that I will think of and discard many words in a short time as I try to find one that will be in the sweet spot of challenge for the other person to guess.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

It's nice when authors let you know you can safely ignore them so succinctly!

crazygringo3• 2 years ago

What a truly bizarre method. There are so many things wrong with it I don't even know where to begin.

No wonder they came up with such an obviously nonsensical answer in the end.

pro14• 2 years ago

Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.”

Every time I play this game, I can only think of one thing: https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/07/37/42/500_F_207374213_kNgoMel...

So I guess that means I can only think at 1 bit per second.

tim3332• 2 years ago

It seems weird to me. They say 10/bits/sec "behavioral throughput."

Have they not seen a football match? The brain controls 600 or so muscles in a rapid manner. That alone must be a lot of bits per second, certainly far better than computer controlled robots.

Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s?

Tesla's FSD cars have a lot of processing power but still struggle not to drive into fire trucks. You probably need a lot.

GeoAtreides9• 2 years ago

I beg you, please read the paper before commenting. It's very interesting and it answers a lot of questions that might arise from just skimming the title.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Buddy, I followed the link and they want $35.95 to read the paper.

This is... not a recipe for a successful discussion between people who have read the paper.

greyface-• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449845

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

That might be the funniest comment I've ever seen on HN!

A plea to reason, that is probably not outside the posting guidelines, but is certainly in a gray area :-)

GeoAtreides9• 2 years ago

I honestly don't understand why it would be funny or in a gray area to recommend people to actual read the paper?

ganzuul• 2 years ago

I conclude that if you perform horrific experiments on animals then our intelligent universe reduces the rate at which you can continue to 10bps.

This is why enlightenment cures you of your curiosity.

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

Only 10 beatings per second? This is a just universe, Sir!

On a serious note, enlightenment only cures us of our selfish curiosity, i.e. any action which causes harm to others. The Way requires us to harmonize with universal compassion, so there is take and give (especially with regard to our required sustenance), but we definitely lose our propensity to experiment with our power at the expense of others. No, we are to increase our curiosity in how we can better help others, help being the cornerstone of compassion.

imtringued• 2 years ago

I don't need to read the paper. The problem is that mechanical systems have inertia and are limited in their ability to change direction and thereby their ability to signal discrete information.

newswasboring• 2 years ago

Found the pre print if you don't have access

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

The only time 'bits' will ever be an appropriate measure of human processing is when we are processing or producing diginal information artifacts, e.g. a typewritten document.

Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis. That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender.

No one is male OR female. We are, every single one of us, a combination of male and female hormones. The more "male" a person is is the result of that balance favoring the male hormones; and vice versa. What humanity is now struggling with is that there are plenty of folks with lots of both or little of either and all kinds of combinations.

Of course, my not being a biochemist means my categorization of hormones into "male" and "female" is, itself, likely to be a poorly booleanized representation of their natures.

We are much more akin to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics description of reality, than to digital logic's boolean description.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender.

What you go on to discuss is sex, and sexual dimorphism, which is a remarkably robust way of classification. The "classical" notions of gender (tbh, "classical" doesn't make much sense here) as sex based is fairly reasonable all things considered. Consider the arguments presented in this essay [0]. That, however, doesn't really mean much for how we should treaty people in public who desire to express their gender in different ways, which is, of course, respecting of their dignity and desires, in most cases.

[0] https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

Well said.

Yeah, what I mean by classical would boil down to just genitalia, which doesn't really hold up in how we must respect the person and how they feel and choose to express themselves. Yes, so long as their expressions are not harming others, then we must respect their human right to choose who they are.

I've got to give a huge hat tip to Suzi (Eddie) Izzard, who -- beyond their being just a brilliant comic and generally good human being -- taught me and my fam about how the spectrum of human configuration is way more complex than just male and female.

Cheers, friend.

malfist2• 2 years ago

In biology, or really most sciences (math being an exception), the more closely you examine a delineated this or that categorization, the more you realize it's a scale, a range, or something fuzzy.

Like even things we talk about regularly like touch and space is vague in the details. Is it still touching if the repulsive force of electron to electron is keeping nucleus apart? Where is empty space begin and an atom end? Is it after the electron shell? Outside of it's repulsive force? Some hybrid value?

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

I hope you're not asking me those questions ;-)

Yeah, those are great questions, for sure.

I can always be awestruckdumb by the understanding that we are all mostly space inhabited by fields, our littlest bits vibrating at mindblowing speeds.

psychoslave2• 2 years ago

Surely you will enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_mathematics

Also remember that putting a topic under mathematical form or mere layman prose is also a spectral arbitrary categorization.

the__alchemist• 2 years ago

To address your "empty space" question, you must first define, specifically, what you mean by this phrase.

psychoslave2• 2 years ago

What humanity is now struggling with is that there are plenty of folks with lots of both or little of either and all kinds of combinations.

Even that is a very smooth view of humanity as if was all going through more or less the same mindset.

Rest assured that most of humanity don’t conceive their life experience according to a scientific measure of information units.

uoaei• 2 years ago

I think you've mixed up a few mostly unrelated things together to make a point. You're correct in that the larger point to be made is that analog and digital computing are paradigmatically distinct and analogies are hard to draw across that divide.

However, "bits" is just a quantity of information in a certain base. We could discuss it in "nits" if you prefer. The point is that information per se remains real even if the specific representation is based on some assumption of digital computing.

The rest of your comment is unfortunately out of scope of this article although it deserves some discussion on its own merit.

Retric• 2 years ago

Boolean logic extends just fine to handle complexity. Instead it’s the intuitive classification people come up with that are often a poor fit for reality.

Is someone’s DNA consistent throughout their body? Y/N Does someone have any chromosomal anomalies? Y/N etc

Similarly it’s very possible for a girl to suffer from abnormally low testosterone levels which doesn’t fit with how the public thinks of it as a gendered hormone. During puberty it normally spikes in both girls and boys. From a range of (2.5 - 10) in prepubescents, the typical range in puberty for boys is much higher (100 - 970) vs (15 - 38) but that doesn’t make it a male hormone just a pathway used differently.

Asraelite• 2 years ago

Bits are a perfectly acceptable way to measure biological information processing. These are not the boolean logic digital bits like on a computer. They're the more abstract concept of a bit in information theory.

Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system can be in (accounting for statistical uncertainty/biases if needed), take the base 2 logarithm of that number, and you have the bits of information in the system. This can be applied to basically anything, biological or otherwise.

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

But if your measurements are unreliable or downright flawed, then it's just garbage-in-garbage-out.

Sounds like the statistics in the papers from the social "sciences".

"There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown

I don't think you're going to be able to count the "number of distinct possible configurations" of an even moderately complex living system.

aziaziazi2• 2 years ago

Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system

Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.

gmadsen• 2 years ago

it is a categorization, like all things in biology. One of the most robust and significant ones for all of life is sexual versus asexual reproduction. It is intentionally blurring understanding to say that it is not a binary. This is not a gaussian situation, and not fitting into this categorization is exceedingly rare due to defect/mutation which largely does not proliferate genetically.

johnnyjeans• 2 years ago

Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis.

All physical systems are described on a base-2 basis using bits, or shannon entropy.

VyseofArcadia4• 2 years ago

A bit is the fundamental unit of information theory, and has nothing to do with digital logic in this context. No one is saying "ok use one bit to encode male or female". No one is saying "ok 101 means serotonin, and 110 is dopamine". What they are saying is that the information content produced by a human being can be compressed down to about 10 bits per second, but this is a statistical description.

MrMcCall9• 2 years ago

You said both

  nothing to do with digital logic in this context

and

  compressed down to about 10 bits per second

Sounds like digital compression from where I sit, friend.

Are you using an information theory that is based upon something different from Shannon's?

GuB-42• 2 years ago

The use of "bits" here doesn't mean we are working in binary.

It is more like the way it is used in information theory. The number of bits is log2 of the number of states that can be represented, and it doesn't have to be an integer. For example, with 10 bits of information, we can distinguish between 1024 different states, it can be 1024 colors for instance, or 1024 genders if you wish, it doesn't matter, the important part is that there are 1024 boxes to put things in, no matter what they are. Of course, it doesn't mean that only 1024 colors exist in the universe, there are an infinity of them, but with 10 bits, you can only distinguish between 1024 of them. If you want more, you need more bits, if you can do with less, you need less.

By the article results, it means your "inner brain" can process one color with 1024 nuances per second, or 2 independent colors with 16 nuances each per second. If the colors are not independent, it can process more, because, if, say, you know that the two color are highly contrasting, you don't have to allocate "boxes" for noncontrasting colors, may free some boxes for more nuances, so, you may, for instance, process two contrasting colors with 100 nuances each with these 10 bits.

countarthur• 2 years ago

What you're saying is interesting but I think the causality is backwards here and I can provide some examples to show why.

(By male hormone I'm assuming you mean testosterone, and by female hormone I assume you mean oestrogen.) i in fact If being "more male" came from having more testosterone (and vice versa), then logically when children go through puberty and develop into adults, they would become "more" male or "more" female.

As adults become elderly and naturally produce less sex-associated hormones, they would become "less" male or female.

(Fetuses do not all begin in the womb as female, that's a common misunderstanding. We start off physically undifferentiated, and develop along a genetically predetermined pathway as we grow. Some animals use temperature or other environmental triggers to pick, humans use genes.)

Would that mean a male bodybuilder who injects testosterone is more male than a man that doesn't? His phenotype may become visibly more masculine, but that doesn't change his sex at all. Same for a female bodybuilder that injects testosterone - she may develop stereotypically male physical characteristics like large muscles and a deeper voice, but her sex is unaffected.

The causality is the other way: being male - or - female results in a physiology (adult testicles/ovaries) that produces sex associated hormones in larger or lesser degrees depending on the person (and in some cases very low amounts or not at all).

This makes sense if sex is a binary (with rare differences of sex development - detailed here https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-cha... ) that results in different levels of sex hormones in the body and resulting phenotype. So yes, everyone is male or female.

(I'm not referring to gender here - I'm talking only about sex)

If there's a spectrum then some men could be biologically "more male" than others and vice versa for women. I've not seen any evidence of this myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

Extropy_• 2 years ago

What about male and female- and _N_ genetic syndrome- in terms of XX or XY chromosomes?

FL33TW00D• 2 years ago

The title is a reference to "The unbearable lightness of being" by Milan Kundera for those unaware.

wigster• 2 years ago

perhaps the 10 bits/s is throttled at the simulation level ;-)

mjburgess3• 2 years ago

If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 2^20 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less.

This is an extrinsic definition of "information" which is task relative, and has little to do with any intrinsic processing rate (if such a thing can even be defined for the imagination).

The question of why does biological hardware capable of very high "intrinsic rates" deliver problem solving at "very low extrinsic rates" seems quite trivial. Its even a non-sequitur to compare them: properties of the parts are not properties of wholes. "Why does a gas move at 1 m/s, when its molecules move at 1000s m/s..."

All the 'intrinsic processing' of intelligence is concerned with deploying a very large array of cognitive skills (imagination, coordination, planning, etc.) that are fully general. Any given task has requires all of those top be in operation, and so we expect a much slower rate of 'extrinsic information processing'.

Consider how foolish the paper is to compare the intrinsic processing of a wifi network with the extrinsic task-specific processing of a human: it is likewise the case that if we set a computer the challenge of coordinating the solution of a task (eg., involving several LLMs) across a network, it's task-specific performance would drop off a cliff -- having a much slower 'solution rate' than 10bit/second.

These 'task-specific bits' represent a vast amount of processing work to solve a problem. And are at least as much to do with the problem, than the system solving it.

It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'. Do the same for computers, and you'd likewise find tiny bitrates. The rate at which a problem is solved is 'one part of that problem per second' for a suitable definiton of 'part'

psb217• 2 years ago

Another relevant point is the common anecdote about, eg, some master engineer who gets paid big bucks to come fix some problem that's been blocking up a factory for weeks. The engineer walks around, listens to a few of the machines, and then walks up to one of the machines and knocks it with his elbow Fonzi style and the factory starts running again. The factory boss is happy his factory is working, but annoyed that he paid so much for such an "easy" solution.

Ie, the amount of input and processing required to produce the "right" 10 bits might be far larger than 10 bits. Another obvious example is chess. The amount of bits conveyed by each move is small but, if you want to make the right move, you should probably put some deeper thought into it.

Humans are essentially organisms that collect and filter information, boil it down to a condensed soup of understanding, and emit a light sprinkle of carefully chosen bits intended to reshape the future towards their desires.

pixl972• 2 years ago

Humans are nature's best designed filters.

Or another way of saying it is, the answer was right there all along, the hard part was filtering all the non-answer out.

pizlonator• 2 years ago

I was about to say this but you beat me to it.

Seems like this 10 number comes out of the kind of research where the objective isn’t to find the truth, but to come up with an answer that is headline grabbing. It’s the scientific equivalent of clickbait.

Too bad people fall for it.

fwip• 2 years ago

Exactly. English text is thought to have about 10 bits per word of information content, yet you can read much more quickly than 1 word per second. That includes not just ingesting the word, but also comprehending the meaning the author is conveying and your own reflections on those words.

Ghostt81173• 2 years ago

This type of comment is my least favorite on HN. "Seems quite trivial," "non-sequitur to compare them," "foolish." I am not able to read the paper as I do not have access, but the published perspective has 131 citations which seem to consider everything from task-specific human abilities, to cortical processing speeds, to perception and limb movements and eye movements, and so on.

I'm glad you thought about it too, but to assume that the authors are just silly and don't understand the problem space is really not a good contribution to conversation.

cscheid• 2 years ago

(Disclosure: I’m a former academic with more than a handful of papers to my name)

The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper, and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves no favors by being unnecessarily kind to bad work. It’s important to keep perspective.

cess11• 2 years ago

I see there are some people in the thread that doubt the low bandwidth between conscious thought and the rest of the central nervous system.

Do you also doubt that you're actually living half a second in the past, with the brain compensating for this lag between initial perception and conscious reception of the indirect effects of it?

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Our awareness of time seem arbitrary. If feels time went by fast/slow, how does that work anyways?

bennettnate5• 2 years ago

Why can we only think about one thing at a time?

Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even when the direct focus of our thoughts isn't on that topic. What if the mind could maintain multiple threads of thoughts at once, but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?

thmsths• 2 years ago

I am not qualified to judge whether you're right or wrong but I love that concept!

jdbxhdd• 2 years ago

Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time.

We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations.

Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what to respond to a fourth

We just switch our focus of attention quite fast

imzadi• 2 years ago

This is the part that bothers me. I can definitely think of multiple things at a time. It really just depends on the complexity of the tasks. I can listen to and process and audiobook while driving to work every morning, for instance. I definitely can have multiple thoughts in parallel. I remember when I used to recite prayers, I would be reciting the memorized prayer while thinking about other things. Both things were happening at the same time. The memorized task takes less processing power, but it still requires some thought to execute.

Enginerrrd• 2 years ago

As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves.

Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit between them quite rapidly.

Personally, I sort of agree, but I notice that there seems to be a time-compression thing happening where the pearl delivered to attention can contain a compressed summary of continuous perception. This seems to work for 2 things at once in awareness. When you start monitoring 3+ streams, there are gaps. And even maintaining the 2 streams continuously is exhausting so the mind tends to relax a little and leave gaps on a normal basis, but it seems like it can monitor dual feeds when its particularly important.

My understanding is that neuroscience largely seems to agree with the above.

(Actually, I'll note that the USUAL mode of being doesn't even monitor one stream continuously. A lot of the weird effects (and deeply interesting ones!) they talk about in meditative arts seem to pop up when you progress to being able to hold truly continuous attention.)

heyjamesknight4• 2 years ago

What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience.

That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.

davedx2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I'll be deeply thinking about something while driving, and discover I'm at the last road to my house without remembering having driven the previous few blocks. It's quite disturbing. When I say deeply thinking I don't mean anything involving phones or external stimuli - really just thinking about a particular problem I'm working on. I also don't deliberately engage this deep mode of thought, I just sort of slide into it naturally.

Does anyone else have this happen? I don't think my driving is suffering, but it's hard to really honestly say?

Bjartr2• 2 years ago

I wonder if some people with dissociative identity disorder, or who at least identify as plural, experience overlapping simultaneous trains of thought

pixl972• 2 years ago

Heh if there are two yous occurring at the same time, one you would never know about it. Only third party observation would be able to tell you

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 years ago

We think about many things at a time. But for those with malfunctioning brains that have the internal monologue going constantly, they mistaken that monologue for their thoughts and so it must be "one thing at a time". The language they experience their monologue in is by its very nature, sequential, you can't speak or even hear/understand two parallel streams of speech.

Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even

That's not "in the background". That's the real you, your real mind. That's the foreground. But, if your brain malfunctions as many do, then the monologue shows up and crowds out everything. Sometimes it is apparently loud enough that it even prevents those "a-ha!" moments.

but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?

The language should just be discarded. What you want is an internal silence.

lanstin3• 2 years ago

I wouldn’t say it’s language so much as unnecessarily added language. Words and sentences can appear and be useful, but there is a lot of mental activity that is not essential but added on responses to things. I wouldn’t say a component that generates comments is a broken brain, it believing the comments or the beliefs embedded inside them can break your contentedness.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

I don't know what ever became of the line of research, but there was a very interesting book I read decades ago called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio that examined case studies of patients who had their corpus collosum severed, resulting in a split brain. You could show their left and right eyes different images and ask them what they saw and they would write and speak different answers, because speech and writing are controlled by different brain hemispheres.

This seems to suggest that any bottleneck in conscious attention is not an inherent limitation of an animal brain but rather a consensus mechanism we've developed to keep our chain of experience coherent. If we get rid of the constraint that all of our external communication channels need to present the same narrative, we can seemingly process more information even when it requires being a conscious center of attention.

prmph• 2 years ago

It's like UIs being single-threaded, because otherwise you would have chaos if several background threads are trying to update the UI at the same time.

linuxdude314• 2 years ago

FWIW the title of this article is a play on the title of Milan Kundera's famous book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".

PittleyDunkin2• 2 years ago

Why can we only think about one thing at a time?

This sort of reasoning seems to be a symptom of inadequate communication/jargon/diction describing mental faculties. Many times during serious thought there's no discrete "number of thoughts" occuring at all: there's just a hazy mental process that resolves to some result and often many results. This reminds me of the "80% of people have no inner monologue!!!" bullshit that went around recently.

VoodooJuJu• 2 years ago

Bits are a unit of measurement we use in relation to computers. Humans are not computers. Do not use bits to measure anything in relation to humans. Stop thinking of humans as computers. It's dehumanizing, unhealthy, and a very narrow way to think of people. Using a computer model for humans is useless at best and misleading at worst.

skibz• 2 years ago

This paper isn't proposing that humans can be understood using a "computer model".

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

It seems very odd that the article seems to be measuring the information content of specific tasks that the brain is doing or specific objects that it is perceiving. But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer.

When you look at a Rubik's cube, you don't just pick out specific positions of colored squares relative to each other. You also pick up the fact that it's a Rubik's cube and not a bird or a series of binary digits or English text. If an orange cat lunged at your Rubik's cube while you were studying it, you wouldn't process it as "face 3 has 4 red squares on the first row, then an orange diagonal with sharp claws", you'd process it as "fast moving sharp clawed orange cat attacking cube". Which implies that every time you loom at the cube you also notice that it's still a cube and not any of the millions of other objects you can recognize, adding many more bits of information.

Similarly, when you're typing English text, you're not just encoding information from your brain into English text, you're also deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. Not to mention the precise mechanical control of your muscles to achieve the requisite movements, which we're having significant trouble programming into a robot.

gtirloni2• 2 years ago

My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.

sigmoid108• 2 years ago

Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving it with your hands while someone shows you a bunch of objects and asks you visual comprehension questions at the same time. You might still perceive those other objects, but consciously classifying them verbally is gonna be really difficult. It's no surprise that the feature space that your deeper brain can actively work on is quite limited.

kijin3• 2 years ago

Send a query to your favorite database. The database preprocesses hundreds of gigabytes of data, map-reduces it, and finally returns a single 32-bit integer, taking exactly 3.2 seconds to do so.

Nobody would say that the database can only process 10 bits per second. The query just happened to ask for a very simplified answer.

infogulch• 2 years ago

Such reductionist analyses are reliably blind to the complexity of being embodied in physical reality.

WXLCKNO• 2 years ago

Should they analyse everything all at once? Your comment seems reductionist to the realities of writing a paper on a specific subject.

scotty795• 2 years ago

Reductionism is the only way humanity ever progressed on anything.

wruza4• 2 years ago

Otoh, I just spent a minute to even comprehend your idea. We are living in the information era, the era of dodging an orange cat has ended. And we suck at this new thing, really. We’re like slow af emulators of logic programs and tend to fallback to animal mode when tired or clueless.

tmiku• 2 years ago

Do you really think that the fundamental human act of the current era is running logic programs? I don't dispute that digital logic and its uses deeply changed humanity, but this is like calling humans "weak af imitations of steam engines" during the late-1800s railroad boom.

Calling actions/thoughts that follow a concrete list of logical rules/algorithms "animal mode" is deeply anti-human.

colordrops• 2 years ago

The PhD student writing this could be excused for being young an inexperienced but their advisor, tagged second on the paper, should have cut this off at the pass.

ComplexSystems3• 2 years ago

On the other hand, the amount of actual entropic "information" that is processed when you identify a Rubik's cube as such may be nowhere near as much as you think it is, and most importantly, 10 bits may be nowhere near as little as you think it is.

If we use your example, which is that of identifying an object, we may simply ask the entropy of what the distribution of possible objects-to-be-identified is at t=0, prior to any analysis. Saying we can resolve 10 bits of this entropy per second is equivalent to saying that we can identify one object from a uniform distribution of 1024 per second. Let's suppose this is a low estimate by several orders of magnitude, and that it's really one from a billion objects instead that you can identify per second. Then this would still only be about 30 bits/sec.

None of this changes the main thesis of the paper, which is that this is much lower than the 10⁹ bits/sec our sensory systems transmit.

FartyMcFarter2• 2 years ago

But you don't just perceive an object's category (like "cat"). We also perceive a high amount of detail about the object - colour, pattern, behaviour, we make comparisons to past behaviour, predictions of what's likely to happen next and so on.

Sure, some parts of the brain don't receive all that detail, but that's necessary for abstraction. If you pumped all the sensory data everywhere, the brain would get overwhelmed for no reason.

dantillberg• 2 years ago

deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk.

How many bits of actual decision is going on here, as compared to the period of time that decision applies to?

For example, if a person decided once per second whether or not to go for a walk, that could be 1 bit per second. But if that person is constantly transitioning back and forth between walking and not-walking, we could consider their behavior pathological. Instead, for most people, the information density of these decisions is quite low, i.e. the per-second decision bits are very compressible.

Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. Even if we add in bits for "where" and "precisely when" and "how long", I think we're still at just a small fraction of 1 bit per second.

lukan2• 2 years ago

"Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. "

Consciously. Subconsciously much more is going on.

causi• 2 years ago

The vast majority of the brain's processing power, including conceptual processing, is not conscious. Conscious thought is the framebuffer of the mind, subconscious is the RAM.

dsr_• 2 years ago

Your conscious planner may be making 1 decision/second, but your senses, proprioception, balancing system, etc. are handing you about a gigabit/second of data, most of which never rises to your conscious attention.

When I'm reading, that's roughly 2000 bits/second, but I am engaging it with model-making systems that can completely enrapture me.

I/O is not the same as computation; conscious computation is not the same as all computation.

gf0002• 2 years ago

There is a whole "OS" in the background that is way more complex than all of our programmed systems. I may be hyped focusing on a complex program and really not think about anything else, but my body is still constantly senses, processes, and reacts to signals. E.g. I'm not ragdoll falling to the ground, which requires holding balance and tone, which is far from trivial. I also constantly listening to every possible danger, which would immediately override my current activity. I also react to internal signals like hunger or pain.

A bit dumb, but maybe relevant comparison might be asking why can an Apple Watch stay on for a single day only on a charge, while Garmin can do 2 weeks/a month? Because one is a general purpose computer, while the other is an embedded software that can only ever do that few things it is preprogrammed to do.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

  Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes.

Just because usually the decision is 'keep the current course' that doesn't mean no decision has been made.

timerol• 2 years ago

Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes.

And yet, if I walked into your office and shouted your name, you would have less than a second of reaction time, indicating that you are processing all sound around you and deciding whether to get up and talk to someone pretty much continuously.

ozim• 2 years ago

Don’t forget typing in English is also outcome of processing all the context.

Also not so conscious context like „I am writing a reply on HN not on Reddit - making obvious silly pun about cats is not going to make upvotes - making quasi intellectual comment about subconscious processing should earn me some”.

benreesman• 2 years ago

I’m not any good at Rubik’s Cube, and to me it looks like a bunch of colored squares.

But stuff I am good at? I don’t see it at all. A terminal? I never have any truly tangible conscious recollection of serious coding.

It might be the same for people good at Rubik’s Cube.

ggm• 2 years ago

But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer.

Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to think there is something ineffable about thought/cognition which is NOT general purpose computation. It's a heuristic. I dunno what I think.

PittleyDunkin2• 2 years ago

The computer analogy is definitely off. For one thing, rationality is kind of bolted on to our linguistic ability. It's not deeply seated in our brain; it takes substantial energy to engage in logical reasoning and we're not that great at it; even very skilled mathematicians make trivial mistakes.

Deeper in our brain is reasoning about causality. But even that is more of an input to our reactions and emotions than it is as a consciously accessible function, and it too is often wrong.

As you said, it's a heuristic. We certainly can't solve the halting problem with brain magic.

fzeindl3• 2 years ago

Could the 10bits be some sort of instruction-set-address-width?

Meaning that while you are solving the rubik‘s cube, your brain has the capacity of switching into one of 2^10=1024 possible next states, which might fire nerve impulses for the body and also come with a new set of 1024 next states?

When focusing on the cube about 20 or 30 of the next states could be related to the cube, while the rest is concerned with bodily sensations, other thoughts etc.

What if learning something well meant that less states need to be reserved for the task/cube at hand because the decision tree going forward has become more efficiently packed, so more states are open for something else.

seanhunter2• 2 years ago

THe 10 bits is just very obviously made-up nonsense. The brain doesn’t operate on anything like a binary system, sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data. Even the abstract kind of answers its own question. It says sensory data is something like the order of 10^9 bits per second but the “information throughput” is 10 bits per second. It asks “why do we need billions of neurons to process 10 bits per second?” Well we clearly don’t because that’s clearly not what we do. We process 10^9 bits per second, and we do a bunch of things which aren’t just processing sensory data as well. And on top of that we do things which aren’t measured in the 10 bits per second also.

atoav• 2 years ago

Well and not only that, your brain is at the same time processing incoming sounds which it spatializes based on the minor phase/level differences and based onnreflections within the ears themselves. Your brain processes all feelings for all body parts, including a big chunk of skin, temperature perception, sense of gravity to balance yourself, etc.

If you received 10 bits once a second describing all of that, good luck, you probably won't survive the next 15 minutes.

flerchin• 2 years ago

On average, people can read at least 200 WPM, but much higher at the top end. This is orders of magnitude higher than 10 bps.

linearlayer2• 2 years ago

No it's not

l33tman• 2 years ago

The optical nerve has an information density of around 10 MBit/s (ref https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1564115/) Concentrating on only the symbolic thinking speed seems to be unnecessarily restrictive..

nabla9• 2 years ago

The only limit is the max size of Hacker News title allows. :)

a_wild_dandan• 2 years ago

An additional citation substantiating that 10 MB/s figure: the 3rd sentence of TFA.

gchamonlive• 2 years ago

The authors of the article are smuggling in the assumption that 10bits/s is slow.

It's slow when compared to general computing system that we implemented in silicon substrate.

But this assumption doesn't translate linearly to the brain throughput and the perception of existence.

In my opinion the hypothesis is meaningless.

That is not to say the article is meaningless. Actually being able to measure brain information throughput is amazing. It's only that slowness isn't absolute.

Zondartul• 2 years ago

Ask stupid questions, receive stupid answers.

codedokode4• 2 years ago

In particular, our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: The vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior, and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio – about 100,000,000 – remains largely unexplained

The GPU is capable of performing billions of operations per second, yet Cyberpunk barely runs at 60 fps. And there is no paradox at all.

By the way, the brain seems to perform better than a GPU at tasks like image recognition. Probably because it does even more operations per second than the GPU.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Is the brain better than a GPU at image recognition nowadays? Actually I’m not sure how that’s measured. Certainly a GPU could be tied to a database with a lot more things in it, like you can get some pretty impressive facial recognition demos where it’ll recognize a ton of random people.

But humans can see objects they’ve never seen before and sometimes guess what they might be used for, which is sort of like object recognition but better. (Or sometimes I see an object I’m technically familiar with, like an old tool of my grandpa’s, and remembering what he used it for feels more like imagining… maybe it is).

codedokode4• 2 years ago

There is also another comparison. Imagine if your goal is to calculate an integral over 100 dimensional space (or solve a quantum system) and answer whether it is larger or less than zero. This will take enourmous time but produces a single bit of information.

mulippy• 2 years ago

Seems like onsciousness is the bottleneck. It has to integrate over all the perceptions. Of course this will be slower!

kidel001• 2 years ago

These types of articles are so fundamentally flawed... it beggars belief. Why not ask the opposite question: if bandwidth works the way they describe, why can't H100 GPUs (3TB/s bandwidth) perform sensorimotor tasks 24 trillion times faster than a human? (Spoiler alert: they can not).

<s> Could it be... there is a bit of a straw man argument here? About how much information it actually takes to input and output a complete sensorimotor task? I dare say! </s

codedokode4• 2 years ago

The 10 bit/s processing rate doesn't explain why a human talks better than a LLM that consumed terabytes of data traffic during learning.

metalman• 2 years ago

I tried to read the article, but celldotcom has a presumably very high bit rate robot that promptly questioned my humanity, so I did the dishes and ate lunch, but that didn't get through somehow as proof.(of humanity) And so my recourse is to then read the coments here, to try and get the gist of the argument,but even well fed, doing 11 of maybe 12 bits per second, there does not seem to be any point in quibling with reality. Maybe after a bit of shock-o-late icecream, (B and G chockolate therapy with esspresso beans added)

Helmut10001• 2 years ago

I read somewhere that the eye transmits 10 Million bits per second to the brain. I think all of this is a matter of perspective.

titzer• 2 years ago

More generally, the information throughput of human behavior is about 10 bits/s.

I'm sorry, I just can't take this article seriously. They make a fundamental mistake of encoding and assume that information is discretized into word-sized or action-sized chunks.

A good example is a seemingly discrete activity such as playing a musical instrument, like a guitar. A guitar has frets and strings, a seemingly small number of finite notes it can play. So it would seem a perfect candidate for discretization along the lines of the musical scale. But any guitar player or listener knows that a guitar is not a keyboard or midi synth:

1. The attack velocity and angle of the pick intones aggression and emotion, not just along a few prescribed lines like "an angry or sad or loud or quiet".

2. Timing idiosyncracies like being slightly before or after a beat, or speeding up or slowing down, or even arhythmic; the entire expression of a piece of music is changed by subtleties in phrasing.

3. Microbends. The analog nature of strings cannot be hidden entirely behind frets. Differences in the amount of pressure, how close to the fret the fingers are, and slight bending of the strings, intentional or unintentional, static or dynamic, change the pitch of the note.

4. Non-striking sounds like the amount of palming, pick scraping, tapping, and sympathetic vibrations.

Of course there are lots of other things. All of these things make the difference between a master guitar player, say Hendrix, and someone just playing the same notes.

And yes of course we can consider the encoding of the audio coming out of the guitar to be information--at a much higher bitrate, but what about the facial expressions, body language, etc? There are tons of channels coming off a musician, particularly live performances.

This entire article just misses these in picking a quantized encoding of information that of course has a low bitrate. In short, they are missing bazillions of channels, not the least of which is expression and timing.

constantcrying• 2 years ago

It seems the authors conflate a problem bring easy to state with little processing power being needed to solve it. This obviously isn't true, very complex mathematical problems can be stated in very few bits. Human interactions often can be extremely complex, even though they are relatively slow.

Reading a text isn't about matching symbols to words. It is about taking these words and putting them into a social context, potentially even doubting their content or imagining the inner world of the author. Obviously that is what the "inner" brain (which existence seems very dubious to me) has to do.

I see absolutely no paradox at all.

devenson• 2 years ago

Thinking is emulated -- therefore much slower.

zelon88• 2 years ago

Human's can transfer up to 39 bit/s during normal speech, so I highly doubt that it's accurate to describe human "throughput" as being only 10 bit/s.

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

How long a time can you continuously generate that 40bps? If you can only do that 1/4 the time, that's 10bps

nis0s5• 2 years ago

I think the discussion on serial vs parallel processing is incomplete in the linked paper, and is one reason I think the 10 bits/s bottleneck is an incomplete or misinterpreted result. Here’s a review with sources on serial processing, https://journalofcognition.org/articles/10.5334/joc.185

Cognitive psychology has mainly focused on structural and functional limitations of cognitive processes when facing multitasking requirements. Structural limitations assume strict serial processing for at least one processing stage, while functional limitations assume flexible, parallel processing only limited by the number of available resources. Human movement science, on the other hand, emphasizes the plasticity of cognition and training possibilities. As both approaches have provided ample empirical evidence for their views but have predominantly worked in isolation, this example clearly illustrates the need for a more integrative approach to multitasking. A challenge for the contemporary research on multitasking is to bring together the issues of structure, flexibility, and plasticity in human multitasking, offering a new integrative theoretical framework that accounts for this fundamental aspect of human behaviour.

From one of the papers cited by the above reference (Hommel 2020),

A closer look reveals that the questions being asked in dual-task research are not particularly interesting or realistic, and the answers being given lack mechanistic detail. In fact, present theorizing can be considered mere empirical generalization, which has led to merely labeling processing bottlenecks rather than describing how they operate and how they actually produce the bottleneck.

So, while I applaud the authors on generating buzz and discussion, I think their promising work will benefit from more serious consideration of the underlying neurophysiology.

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

there's probably lots of local computation

and i think it's a mistake to simplify it all down to just one substrate or receptor

krzat• 2 years ago

Related question: what's the physical/biological difference between conscious and unconscious?

vok• 2 years ago

There's interesting discussion with the authors here: https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

kubasienki• 2 years ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

UniverseHacker• 2 years ago

What would it really even mean for our brain to be fast or slow? Relative to what?

Inherent speed does not matter and is ill defined, it only matters relative to the environmental processes we have to react to. We’re already orders of magnitude faster than processes like geology and weather, so it is really only other animals where speed matters, and since we’re all using the same basic hardware, we’re on a relatively level playing field there (except for house flies it seems, lol). Time as we understand it may be as much as a cultural construct as anything else (see, for example Timeless physics). Some neurodivergent people, and people from very different cultures don’t experience anything like what most people in our culture refer to as time.

As for thinking about one thing at a time- I am absolutely certain this is false. Our subconscious operates massively parallel, and we only have one conscious thought at a time. But it had an interrupt system that lets it either act instantly itself in an emergency, and to bring things to consciousness when they are important. I’m sure everyone has had the experience of reacting quickly to an emergency with no conscious thought, or suddenly knowing the solution to a problem you hadn’t even been consciously thinking about.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

I skimmed over the paper so sorry if I didn't see it, but isn't the most obvious answer that (at least conscious) human decision making happens at a high level of abstraction? Information output or processing in terms of bits, say the numbers of words in a sentence, isn't equivalent to the meaning or effect that has in the world, which is what matters.

If a general orders an army to go to war that's a few bits of text on a piece of paper, but obviously that bears no relation to the consequence of what that puts into motion in the real world. It's not like we spend most of our days speedcubing or writing and reading the dictionary. We aren't low level data processors even though that might happen unconsciously somewhere in the sensory system, but the conscious mind is a reasoning system.

Even in artificial systems is that visible, from Deepmind on Alpha Zero (https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphazero-shedding-new...)

"For each move, AlphaZero searches only a small fraction of the positions considered by traditional chess engines. In Chess, for example, it searches only 60 thousand positions per second in chess, compared to roughly 60 million for Stockfish."

Not too draw to many parallels between the human brain and these systems, but they do obviously share the similarity that higher order conceptual decision making compared to just data processing will result in lower rates of decision making at at least the top level. That's for me what you'd expect to happen, not a paradox.

0xbadcafebee• 2 years ago

We process information at the rate we do because that's what works for adaptation to our environment. That's how all biological things develop. Some things are remnants of old adaptations, but generally speaking, we are the way we are because that's what enables our survival. If it seems "slow", it's because it doesn't need to be faster.

Better questions would be, why are we so weak? Why are we defenseless? Why are we hairless? Why do we move so slow? Most other mammals our size are much better equipped for survival. Obviously other beings "perform better" in many ways. Yet our fleshy, weak, slow, gangly, shivery bodies are suited for thinking, for adapting, for communicating and collaborating. However unoptimal or "slow" these authors think our brains are, they are obviously perfectly capable for what they need to do, seeing as we dominate the entire planet.

In any system design, every decision tends to be a tradeoff. You can gain CPU power, but it will cost you energy, heat, and probably stability or longevity. You often do not know what a "feature" will do until you add it. So it's wiser to only add the features you need to accomplish your immediate goals.

If at some point in the future, our survival is existentially threatened by our lack of "processing power", our brains will adapt. Until then, leave well enough alone.

peterfirefly• 2 years ago

10 baud, perhaps. Definitely not 10 bits/s!

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

I’m interested in the phenomenon that no matter how messed up (or absent) my sensory input becomes it doesn’t seem to impact my “inner observer”. The only thing impacting it is sleep or loss of consciousness, yet even then there can be moments during these states that this observer can become lucid.

It’s like the science of the soul and one notable implication is dementia, when people become unable to function and recognize things, I wonder if that “inner observer” is still just as in-tact as it is on a huge dose of LSD?

rbanffy• 2 years ago

I prefer to think of the inherent slowness of my organic brain as a leisurely stroll through time. I’m taking the scenic route though life.

kirkules• 2 years ago

The back of the envelope computations are shockingly shallow and meaningless.

(20 Questions, from the intro) Trying to think of a thing for the game is not a search over a set of known things. Just saying the possibility set has size 2^N doesn't mean that choosing something in the set consists of processing the set. But even if that were the case, and if you do consider each of 2^N options, the consideration process itself is not trivial and probably varies wildly.

(English typing) Touch typists do not (only) simply convert an existing/known string to a sequence of hand actions by mapping character to action. There are whole words and sequences that become units/tokens from the standpoint of muscle memory and processing (this will be relevant to the rubik's cube topic as well). When i type, there's a sort of planning and queueing of actions, but also there's monitoring of actions that allows fast error correction with pressing delete a number of times or holding it and costly determining when the error has been reached, and resuming afterward. Of course the process likely varies from person to person, but there's such a host of other things going on that should count as part of the information processed in this simple behavior that the example and numbers used in the paper for it are utterly useless even as estimates.

(Rubik's cube blind speed solving) Again we see reference to the entire possibility space (from the perspective of possible configurations of the puzzle). But solvers do not identify the configuration they encounter with reference to the space, nor do they search the space for it. They look for patterns and ignore what they cannot use for the strategy they have practiced. The cuber often does not commit to memory the whole configuration, but will often convert it to a custom and bespoke mnemonic. It's just utter nonsense to refer to the number of possible configurations, it has nothing directly to do with what the human is doing.

If I memorize a 30 word passage, i have not "processed the set of possible 30 word passages".

Jensson3• 2 years ago

The answer is that we defined second after the time period it takes for us to think about something, if our thinking was faster the second would also be faster and we would still feel like we only think about about one thing per second.

byyoung3• 2 years ago

"Why can we only think about one thing at a time?" - this is not true? There is a difference between thinking and conscious thinking.

tim3332• 2 years ago

Free access link https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10234

kykeonaut• 2 years ago

So the human brain is a great operating system that is desperately missing a good text editor...

zogomoox• 2 years ago

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

weddpros• 2 years ago

You can compress 10Gbit/s down to 10bit/s but then you can't do the reverse operation... Yeah, we know.

To me it's like saying "I've summarised this book to 5 words, so why would you even need a few days to read it entirely?".

ckemere• 2 years ago

Definitely a neat article insofar as it summarizes many observations about task related “bandwidth” of human output.

Summarizing other comments - calculating bandwidth in a task-specific way neglects metacognition: the Rubik’s cube solver can rapidly recover if someone shoves them when their blindfold is on; the memory champion can notice a pie being aimed at their face and duck. I think that there’s still something interesting around our inability to multitask conscious behaviors, but the overarching conclusion is flawed.

effed3• 2 years ago

10"very-ultra-extreme-high-level"Bit/s (maybe)

leflores• 2 years ago

At what speed is the brain processing when a pair of Chinese ping pong masters are playing? All of this requires seeing the ball coming from the opponent, subconsciously calculating its speed, angle, and rotation to decide how to move your body, legs, arms, hands, and even fingers to hit the ball at the desired location, with the desired angle, and at the desired speed. A standard ping pong table is 2.74 meters long, and in high-speed professional games, the ball can traverse this distance in as little as 90–140 milliseconds. This means players have less than a tenth of a second to react. It's not just the immense image-processing speed required but also the mental speed to transform that visual data into precise positioning and movement of hundreds of muscles in less than a second. Ten bits per second? No way.

The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

Related Stories