Human thought crawls at 10 bits per second, Caltech study finds (www.techspot.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Thanks to @General_Effort@lemmy.world for the links!

Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior

Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0

Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

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[-] leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nl 6 points 1 day ago

i can agree at some extent why it could be at 10bits/sec.

the brain is known to do some shortcuts when parsing/speed reading but slows down when we try to extract details from written works. it is also more tiring to scrutinize details than to just read articles.

i was surprised that they got the speed measured.

[-] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

The Caltech release says they derived it from "a vast amount of scientific literature" including studies of how people read and write. I think the key is going to be how they derived that number from existing studies.

this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024

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