Fast technology and the slowcoach brain – fascinating paper

The findings in this paper by Zheng and Meister 'The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?' are quite startling when you consider the vast disparity between our sensory input capacity and our cognitive processing speed. It's almost as if we're living in slow motion within a world of high-speed data. This realisation challenges our intuitive understanding of human intelligence and efficiency. 

Shaped by evolution

It's astonishing that despite our sensory systems being capable of absorbing vast amounts of data, our cognitive output remains so limited. The surprise at this slow processing suggests that perhaps our brain isn't designed for speed but for careful, deliberate processing which might be more suited to survival in our evolutionary context. Humans and other species might operate at rates sufficient for their ecological niches, suggesting evolutionary constraints. Human cognition tends towards serial processes, possibly due to evolutionary origins where multitasking was not advantageous.

Humans process information at an oddly slow rate of about 10 bits per second (bps). This contrasts starkly with our sensory input capacity of approximately 10^9 bps. Even expert typists operate at around 10 bps, English narration speed suggests an information rate of about 13 bps, blindfolded speed-cubing has a perception rate during the puzzle inspection phase of around 11.8 bps. Top-end memory tasks like binary digit memorisation or speed card inspection reveal rates from 5 to 18 bps, showing that even under high memory demands, the rate remains within the 10 bps ballpark.

Bottleneck

The bottleneck is not neural capacity, it is throughput. Sensory neurons, particularly photoreceptors, can handle gigabits of data, while the brain's behavioural output remains at 10 bps. The paradox is that, despite having neurons capable of transmitting information quickly, when it comes to human behaviour and cognition, we are slowcoaches. This limitation seems to be fundamental.

Photographic memory claims turn out to be false. Even with exceptional memory, the data acquisition rate doesn't significantly exceed 10 bps. Our perceived richness of visual scenes is an illusion, as actual perception is much more limited, especially outside the focal point.

Let’s think about this, albeit in a limited and slow fashion! Even with advanced technology like Neuralink, we'd still be bound by this 10 bps limit for cognitive throughput. This is a sobering thought. If our brain operates at such a slow rate, it might imply that human ‘intelligence’ is less about raw computational power and more about the quality and nature of information processing that focuses on depth rather than breadth.

Conclusion

Neurons are not inherently inefficient; rather, the brain's architecture seems optimised for serial processing over parallel. With AI we have several dimensions of scale, in terms of relevant data, retrieval and parallel processing. AI may be offering a way out of this human envelope, that of being fixed, linear and slow, to augmenting our abilities with technology that is flexible, parallel and fast.