{"id":263,"date":"2025-10-27T17:02:04","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T00:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/?p=263"},"modified":"2025-10-27T17:07:49","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T00:07:49","slug":"brain-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/brain-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain Speed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Human thought moves at about 10 bits per second\u2014roughly the pace of a conversation. (Scientific American article, https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/the-human-brain-operates-at-a-stunningly-slow-pace\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast, our senses deliver about a billion bits per second, most of which the brain filters out before we\u2019re even aware of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experts such as athletes, musicians, and dancers can operate at higher apparent \u201cbit rates.\u201d Years of practice let them rely on muscle memory, freeing the conscious mind from making every decision. Measuring their bit rate is hard but a fast typist\u2019s speed is easier\u2014around 120 words per minute (Wikipedia, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Words_per_minute<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet even these feats are glacial compared with computer speeds. As someone who has worked with software since the dawn of personal computing, I\u2019m still amazed by the pace of new hardware. Modern graphics processors perform trillions of operations per second. (YouTube, https:\/\/youtu.be\/pPStdjuYzSI?si=Y_F3v4GZ9kjuXPZj<\/a>) \u2014 NVIDIA Cuda GPU)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s difficult to grasp speeds so far beyond human experience. One way is to scale computer operations to human time\u2014for example, imagine if a computer\u2019s cycle time was one-second then look at the resulting scaled up numbers; the delays between operations would stretch to centuries. A chart illustrates this for programmers:
(\u201cLatency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know\u201d, https:\/\/ifunny.co\/picture\/a-latency-numbers-every-programmer-should-know-it-is-hard-W47dciSK5?s=cl<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another way is to see the speed in action. Watch these machines sorting and counting tiny objects at mind-bending rates:
\u2022 Sorting grapes at 45 mph with puffs of air (YouTube, https:\/\/youtu.be\/xGdFpwVuPDM?si=Z7i1Kk5nD39LnuQ2<\/a>)
\u2022 Counting small parts at high speed (YouTube, https:\/\/youtube.com\/shorts\/a23yuW0OAcY?si=wN5C03fNOuNlQZMO<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does all this mean for us? Science fiction has long explored the possibilities:
\u2022 Using machines as powerful tools
\u2022 Combining humans with computer parts
\u2022 Fearing machines surpass us and take over
\u2022 Uploading our minds into simulations \u2014 (one mind one thumb drive).
\u2022 Debating Asimov\u2019s Laws of Robotics
\u2022 And much more\u2014an endlessly fertile area of speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you ask ChatGPT a question and it replies in seconds with pages of coherent text, you know it isn\u2019t a person typing the answer. The results may not be perfect, but they are astonishing\u2014especially when you realize they come from an algorithm predicting the next word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing clearly is hard for me, but with AI\u2019s help I can refine my ideas into something readable. For now, I count myself in the \u201ctool user\u201d category of AI.
(note: I like and use em dashes).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the question remains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can we keep up\u2014thinking at only 10 bits per second?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Human thought moves at about 10 bits per second\u2014roughly the pace of a conversation. (Scientific American article, https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/the-human-brain-operates-at-a-stunningly-slow-pace\/) By contrast, our senses deliver about a billion bits per second, most of which the brain filters out before we\u2019re even aware … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flenniken.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}