The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior

by belter • 2 years ago

11 10 2 years ago

nayuki• 2 years ago

Related to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602 "The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?", https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0?_...

Animats• 2 years ago

Paper on Arxiv (no paywall): [1]

No major new results. It's just an observation that, for things for which human processing bandwidth is measurable, it comes about to 10 bits/sec.

This may simply reflect the writing rate of long-term memory.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10234

082349872349872• 2 years ago

This may simply reflect the writing rate of long-term memory

I don't think write rate is the bottleneck; consider performance on reaction time tests, eg: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime (for what would we need a LT memory write for this task?)

(if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say our scavenging and gathering ancestors never had the need of decision making with cat-like reaction times?)

xyzzy123• 2 years ago

I don't see how you could do what a table tennis player does in 10 bits/sec. Even if we "distil" the torrent of visual information to (e.g. simplified) heading/speed/spin estimates of the ball and do something similar for desired motor movements.

TimTheTinker• 2 years ago

I'm having trouble believing the 10 bits/s claim. That surely can't refer to the collective output of all motor neurons, can it? Athletes and musicians are surely outputting a rate of motor data at least 4 orders of magnitude greater than that. Even people who are sedentary at a desk surely output more than 10 bits/s of motor signals.

Or perhaps the author wants to narrow it to the average rate of verbal thought creation. But even then, I can think of counterexamples.

Any insight what this is actually referring to?

gizajob• 2 years ago

As seen commented in the other thread, I feel like this metric of 10 bits per second for “thinking” could be wildly incorrect. Firstly I can “think” with my imagination – conjure up whole evolving worlds in my minds eye – this would be megabits per second easily if on a display. Secondly, a lot of my “thinking” is done semi-below my conscious radar, in that I set a task, say writing, and my mind chews on it while I do other things – for example if I’m writing an essay or book chapter, I can be mulling it over in the background while cycling or walking and doing other things, and then later sit down and churn it out. I feel like a couple of philosophers need to bang their heads together with the researcher with regards to thinking. It’s way higher than 70 bytes per minute.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

The subconscious reflex of avoiding an object thrown at your eye is certainly faster than 10 bits per second.

FooBarBizBazz2• 2 years ago

What if those worlds are encoded so efficiently that they can be communicated in only 10 bits/sec? Maybe there's tons of detail but not very much is actually probable, so one part of your mind can "fill in the gaps" without another part "saying" much to it. Like the married couple who have been together so long they don't have to say anything and each still knows what the other means.

idiomaddict• 2 years ago

Please excuse my technological illiteracy. Isn’t that just a form of compression that might reduce the (uhh) space that the image takes up without actually reducing the information processing?

The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

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