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The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

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Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#291

Post by freehorse »

DamonHD wrote: post #175
MrMcCall wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking people to read the article before commenting? A commonsense suggestion that needs to be made makes me smirk inside, not the least because I am guilty of this, too, around here. (But not this time, thank you, kind Sir.) As to being in a "gray area", have you read the posting guidelines? ;-) I'm pretty sure it says we shouldn't say things like "read the article" or "you haven't read the article, have you?" in ou…

I am very very annoyed by many of the shallow "it's obviously wrong" comments on this story. And thank you to those rebutting more politely than I feel inclined to. It's a fascinating paper and something that I have been interested in since before [0] and ties in to a strand of work in my PhD research. Also see for example [1]. [0] Stevens, M. Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution, OUP Oxford, 2013, ISBN 97801996…

> "it's obviously wrong" comments

The article is not even wrong imo, it is non-sense. Eg when we speak we convey much more information than just with the words we say. We communicate "information" using intonation, changing the rate of the speech, body language etc. Statements like "10 bits per seconds" are ridiculous clickbaits, and cognitive scientists should study cognition in more ecologically valid settings if they want to make any sense.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#294

Post by gf000 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #251
gf000 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole "OS" in the background that is way more complex than all of our programmed systems. I may be hyped focusing on a complex program and really not think about anything else, but my body is still constantly senses, processes, and reacts to signals. E.g. I'm not ragdoll falling to the ground, which requires holding balance and tone, which is far from trivial. I also constantly listening to every possible…

I don't see your comparison as relevant. I'm a metre away from a nine-year-old Android 6 phone that can easily go a month on a single charge (while tracking its location!). Your Apple Watch is (a) constantly using its radio, (b) running a fairly high-end graphics chip, and (c) actively probing your body at intervals. Nothing to do with software.

I mentioned two watches with similarly sized batteries.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#295

Post by datameta »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #93
Enginerrrd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves. Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit b…

What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience. That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between t…

As far as I know, our wetware builds the hardware as the software runs. Like some kind of self-agglomerating and pruning FPGA

"... neurons that fire together wire together" (essentially)

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#296

Post by anticensor »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #142
gtirloni wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.

Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving…

There is something wrong with that calculation: our speech output alone is 40 bits per second.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#297

Post by fzeindl »

tsimionescu wrote: post #100

It seems very odd that the article seems to be measuring the information content of specific tasks that the brain is doing or specific objects that it is perceiving. But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer. When you look at a Rubik's cube, you don't just pick out specific positions of colored squares relative…

Could the 10bits be some sort of instruction-set-address-width?

Meaning that while you are solving the rubik‘s cube, your brain has the capacity of switching into one of 2^10=1024 possible next states, which might fire nerve impulses for the body and also come with a new set of 1024 next states?

When focusing on the cube about 20 or 30 of the next states could be related to the cube, while the rest is concerned with bodily sensations, other thoughts etc.

What if learning something well meant that less states need to be reserved for the task/cube at hand because the decision tree going forward has become more efficiently packed, so more states are open for something else.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#298

Post by davedx »

lanstin wrote: post #140
davedx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I'll be deeply thinking about something while driving, and discover I'm at the last road to my house without remembering having driven the previous few blocks. It's quite disturbing. When I say deeply thinking I don't mean anything involving phones or external stimuli - really just thinking about a particular problem I'm working on. I also don't deliberately engage this deep mode of thought, I just sort of…

When I have a deeply engrossing unitary (I.e. not one of five tasks but one task for months) project at work I had better start commuting by train and cut out the driving. I have lost two cars by not doing that. Fortunately no one was hurt. One car I had towed to the work parking lot, and just never thought about it until some time after the project when it turned out the office just had it towed off as unknown junk.…

Oof, that's kind of scary. Sorry you experienced it, and glad nobody was hurt.

I had a workmate at a gamedev place I worked (so lots of deep technical challenges) who apparently regularly missed the motorway exit for work because he was thinking about what he was working on.

I guess the point is even if the distraction is 100% internal you should still do your best to pull yourself out and get your focus back on the road.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#299

Post by DamonHD »

freehorse wrote: post #291
DamonHD wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very very annoyed by many of the shallow "it's obviously wrong" comments on this story. And thank you to those rebutting more politely than I feel inclined to. It's a fascinating paper and something that I have been interested in since before [0] and ties in to a strand of work in my PhD research. Also see for example [1]. [0] Stevens, M. Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution, OUP Oxford, 2013, ISBN 97801996…

> "it's obviously wrong" comments The article is not even wrong imo, it is non-sense. Eg when we speak we convey much more information than just with the words we say. We communicate "information" using intonation, changing the rate of the speech, body language etc. Statements like "10 bits per seconds" are ridiculous clickbaits, and cognitive scientists should study cognition in more ecologically valid settings if t…

You appreciate that the contrast that is being highlighted in the paper is the missing 8 orders of magnitude? A little bit more than the OOM baseline claim of 10bps highlighted is neither here nor there.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#300

Post by sigmoid10 »

axus wrote: post #258
sigmoid10 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hutter prize submissions can get compression factors >9 on english wiki text. And if you're listening to podcasts the entropy is probably even lower. The human brain is obviously a much better language model than anything we have today, so you can assume that the latent layer in your brain deals with much less than 60 bits per second.

Each second of listening we're perceiving the speaker's identity, what accent they are using, how fast they are talking, and what emotions they are showing. Those should count for the bit rate dealt with by the conscious brain.

Again: perception is not what we're talking about and the paper acknowledges that perceptive input is orders of magnitude larger. I challenge you to listen comprehensively to someone talking about a topic you don't know while identifying someone in a police lineup.
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