The speed of human perception is surprisingly slow, say neuroscientists. That has important implications for our understanding of cognition and for the limits of brain computer interfaces.
One of the great endeavors of modern science is to understand the brain. This organ, the most complex machine we know, is a miracle of evolutionary biology. It processes a potent firehose of information to set goals, achieve tasks and navigate complex environments, often in ways that put the world’s most powerful supercomputers to shame. Remarkably, it weighs about the same as a bag of flour and runs on little more than a bowl of porridge.
For example, they say that photoreceptors in the eye convert the amount of light they receive into a continuously varying membrane potential at a rate equivalent to about 270 bits per second. And since a single eye contains about six million receptors, that’s a total data rate of 1.6 gigabits per second.
That raises the interesting question of how much compression has taken place by the time this information reaches the level of perception. Put simply, how quickly do we think? That’s an extraordinary result. It implies that the rate of data perception is tiny compared to the rate at which we encounter data in the environment. Zheng and Meister give the example of a home WiFi network, which operates at 100 megabits per second to stream Netflix shows, even though our brains will never absorb more than 10 bits per second of that stream.
The researchers have a sobering message for Elon Musk and his attempts to increase the bandwidth from the brain by creating a direct connection with the outside world. They point out it’s easy for people to imagine that their internal monologue is far richer than they are able to communicate. But this is an illusion.
Instead, a better approach might be to feed preprocessed information into the brain at a rate it can easily process, in other words at about 10 bits per second. This might include the identity and location of objects and people in a scene, in a way that allows interaction, obstacle avoidance and so on. “This can be done comfortably using natural language: A computer translates the visual scene to speech in real-time and narrates it to the user according to their needs,” say the researchers.
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