United States: In today’s digital world, a slow internet connection can be really frustrating. When the internet is slow, your web browser lags, and video calls can freeze, making it feel like you’re cut off from the world.
Engineers measure internet speed in bits per second (bps). For example, streaming a high-definition video uses about 25 million bps, while the average internet speed in a typical American home is about 262 million bps.
Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps. But the authors of the study, published this month in the journal Neuron, called it the unbearable slowness of being.
‘We like to call it a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,’ Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology and here the one of the study’s authors, said in a phone interview. “We are really, really slow with the putting numbers to it.”
As this is reported by The Seattle Times, the idea for the study came to me when I’m teaching an introductory neuroscience class. He wanted to give some basic numbers about the brain to his students. Nobody had yet pinned down the rate they flow through the nervous system.
Meister knew he could, though, estimate that flow, by looking at how quickly people perform certain tasks. For type — so for example, you look at a word and you see each letter and you figure out the sequence of the keys to press. While typing information flows into our eyes, our brains, and into the muscles of our fingers. The faster we can type depends on the flow rate.
In Finland, based on 136 million keystrokes that were made by 168,000 people in 2018, a team of researchers took a look at the keystrokes made by each letter on the keyboard to determine which letters are used most often and when, along with those that most often appear next to each letter.
But they found that people typed on average at 51 words a minute. Less than 1% typed at least 120 words a minute. To estimate the flow of information, Meister and his graduate student Jieyu Zheng used a branch of mathematics called information theory, and then had to type. The flow is only 10 bits a second at 120 words a minute.
‘Of course there must be faster behaviors,’ Zheng recalled. She wondered if championship video game players are actually getting more information when competing.