Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

I bet, elon musk is going use this data during his next talk about neuralink on human brain is limited to 39bit/sec during output of speech and BCI would surpass this limitation by output to smartphone speakers directly.

Mummy, why is everyone in real life drunk?

Here's an online version, I bet it sounds similar as the original program: https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html

There is a range slider that maxes as 450, which is the maximum speed according to the manual.

I tried listening to a Wikipedia article at 450, I am so amazed you can comprehend that. Perhaps that's equivalent of me visually scanning the text instead of reading, however when I do that, I tend to focus on interesting parts for long stretches of time. With espeak, how do you focus? Can you pause it at will?

Early on when Information Theory was emerging, there were attempts to measure the bandwidth of consciousness. They reckoned about 18 bits per second or less, which sounds very low.

Tor Norretranders book, The User Illusion, mentions some of the research:

W R Garner and Harold W Lake "The Amount of Information in Absolute Judgements" - Psychological Review 58 (1951) - they attempted to measure people's ability to distinguish stimuli (such as light and sound) in bits. Result: 2.2 to 3.2 bits per second.

W E Hick "On the Rate of Gain of Information" - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 4 (1952) - this experiment measured how much information a person could pass on if they acted as a link in a communication channel. That is, faced with a series of flashing lights, subjects had to press the right keys. Result: 5.5 bits per second.

Henry Quastler "Studies of Human Channel Capacity" - Information Theory, Proceedings of the Third London Symposium (1956). Measured how many bits of information are expressed by a pianist while pressing keys on a piano. Result: 25 bits per second.

J R Pierce "Symbols, Signals and Noise" (Harper 1961) - used experiments involving letters and symbols. Result: 44 bits per second.

Discussion of the research, Tor Norretranders book, and what the research may have missed here:

http://memebake.blogspot.com/2008/08/straw-dogs-and-bandwidt...

If your language is complex enough (and it's my understanding that Ithkuil is[0]) that the emitter takes more time to translate thoughts into it, the transmission rate is not going to raise regardless of information density (remember rate is over time).

I guess if we consider non-real time communication, but in that case (e.g. in English, which is limited by the medium's rate) the reception rate is the main factor, which is probably not too far off the transmission rate.

I'd say Ithkuil is designed for information density and my guess is its actual max rate is pretty similar to the submission's 39bps.

[0] IIRC not even its creator is a fluent speaker.