Among the dreams of Tesla’s boss is to unleash the potential of the human mind by letting it express itself through a computer. But speed does not seem to be among the leading characteristics of our brain.
The human brain is slower than you might think. And that could complicate the outcome of technologies that connect it to external sensors to augment its capabilities, like Elon Musk ‘s Neuralink . These are the main conclusions of a new study that finds that our brains can process just 10 bits of information per second. Choosing to ignore the vast majority of the billions of bits per second sent by our sensory organs.
To put that in perspective, a very slow Wi-Fi connection rarely transmits less than 5 megabits per second. Five million bits, or 500,000 times more than our brains can process.
The Musk Illusion
However, many people feel that their thoughts are racing much faster than they can express in words. A (perceived) phenomenon that Elon musk spoke about publicly in a guest appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On that occasion, the entrepreneur defined it as “a bandwidth problem”. Reiterating that one of his medium-term goals is to connect the human mind to a computer to be able to express thoughts without the physical limits imposed by the body. This difference between perception and reality is specifically referred to in the study published in the journal Neuron as the “Musk illusion”. Neuralink is currently able to restore a certain degree of independence to paralyzed people .
The brain is not multitasking
“The human brain is much less impressive than we might think,” study co-author Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Scientific American .”It’s exceptionally slow when it comes to come up with choices, and it’s tremendously slow then any gadget we engage with.” And, unlike popular belief, the brain can only do one thing at a time. To calculate how fast the human brain works. The Caltech researchers drew on data from a large number of scientific studies on activities. Such as reading, writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik’s Cubes.
Why the human brain is incredibly slow
The main question that emerges from the research is why our mind is so slow. Given that individual neurons are much faster. But also why the brain processes a single thought at a time. The authors hypothesize that the phenomenon may have something to do with the evolution of our species. The first living beings did not need to make more than one decision at a time. And this was also the case for much of human history. In which the environment determined whether it was more important to eat, flee, sleep or hunt.https://youtube.com/shorts/9lZQMlXh7gk?si=K2kNdBgxP5pMrITF