Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once?

The research was conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, and it was led by graduate student Jieyu Zheng. A paper describing the study appears in the journal Neuron on December 17.

The paper is titled “The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?” Funding was provided by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain and the National Institutes of Health. Markus Meister is an affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

Read more on the TCCI for Neuroscience website