· Quick Take · 2 min read
The 10-Bit Brain: Why Humans Process at Snail Speed
A surprise finding that our brains process just 10 bits per second. This bandwidth bottleneck explains why multitasking fails.
This paper gives a scientific explanation for why multitasking is bad, because with one task we already use up all our processing bandwidth. Here are some interesting facts from the paper:
We can process max around 10 bps (bits per second) of normal behavior and thought, across tasks like thinking, speaking, typing, and gameplay. That’s surprisingly low and puts a cap on how fast we can read and listen. If you try 3000 words per minute or 3.5x audio, comprehension drops unless the material is very predictable.
So next time, please do not give your stakeholders too much to digest in a 5 minute brief.
Besides, we can process many sensory channels in parallel, but decisions and thoughts run one stream at a time, i.e. our CPU has a single core. So multitasking means you have to constantly switch between thoughts, and it’s worse than just doing one thing at a time.
They point out some paradoxes about the human brain. While we can only process 10 bps, our senses can take in gigabits per second. So a lot of the information from our eyes and ears gets heavily compressed to go through the brain. And because we can only process 10 bps, in our lifetime we can only ingest around 5 GB of data, while our brain can store around 50 TB, about 10k times larger.
All of these bottlenecks make me question what human computer interfaces (like Neuralink) can and cannot do, as that domain will be booming in the next decades.
The paper is a fascinating read: “The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?”, published in Neuron, a premier journal in neuroscience. You can also read it free on arXiv.
