

Human Brain Processing Speed clocked at less than 60 bits/s using Hicks Law - jonmc12
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24030/

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bdfh42
I don't know about you but my visual systems are processing at a greater
bandwidth than that. Plus I am pretty sure that my hearing system is coping
well with the simultaneous audio output of an MP3 track. Plus I am supposedly
doing some work - I think that 60 bits/sec is rather under estimating the
total.

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sp332
FTA: "Martin uses his method to determine how much information the brain can
process during lexical decision tasks. The answer? No more than about 60 bits
per second." So, it's not 60 bits/sec of information processing, but 60 yes/no
decisions per second. That's pretty fast.

~~~
bdfh42
And as each decision requires multiple inputs that would again rubbish the
headline figure - total nonsense.

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jonsen
As far as I remember the book _The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down
to Size_ makes the measure to 16 bits/sec.

A very interesting read now long ago. I must read it again.

[http://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-
Pe...](http://www.amazon.com/User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness-
Penguin/dp/0140230122/)

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javanix
This is pretty cool - as good as an example of the power of massive
parallelism as I've ever seen, anyway.

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newsdog
I thought this might be the case. I figure that working intelligence,
artificial or not, must take in a whole pile of data and throw out almost all
of it, making it's decision based on a few bits.

Thing is, the throwing out part is very elaborate and takes a lot of work.

~~~
pcarmichael
I just finished listening to the audio book format of On Intelligence by Jeff
Hawkins:

[http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-
Hawkins/dp/080507853...](http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-
Hawkins/dp/0805078533/)

(Hopefully I get this right... was pretty sleep deprived while listening to
it.) In the book he describes the core part of intelligence as prediction -
our brain is constantly making predictions from sensory inputs. While our
brains do take in huge amounts of data, Hawkins' theory suggests that it is
being operated on in massive parallelism - with different predictions
happening simultaneously. Thus it isn't so much that all that data is being
thrown away, as it is all being checked against known patterns from previous
memories. He lays out reasoning for how intelligence, creativity, etc. are
formed on top of this prediction model. It is a very interesting read.

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radu_floricica
Speech evolved comparatively late. I'd be willing to bet a motorcycle driver
processes data a lot faster.

