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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?

#91

Post by ceejayoz »

mxfh wrote: post #40
ceejayoz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢0^9 bits/s. The title appears to be accurate?

Just for playing any sport the accuracy to instruct 100s of muscles to work in a certain way is certainly above that 10bits, Pointing out positions in a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cubic volume seems to possible significantly faster than 1/s. The slower examples listed in the table all have some externalities like a motor/object manipulation feedback loop overhead (speed cubing) and or redundacy and are not optimized for pure…

> Just for playing any sport the accuracy to instruct 100s of muscles to work in a certain way is certainly above that 10bits

But significant portions of that process are not done by the conscious brain, and some aren't done by the brain at all (reflex and peripheral nervous system). We don't consciously think about each of the 100 muscles we're switching on and off at rapid speed.

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

#92

Post by taffer »

esperent wrote: post #29
wat10000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is about one bit per letter. If you type at a very fast 120WPM then you’re right at 10bps. Computers just don’t represent English very efficiently, even with gzip.

> English is about one bit per letter Where did you get that number from? How would you represent a letter using 1 bit?

In practice, it is even less. Current state-of-the-art algorithms compress the English Wikipedia using just 0.8 bits per character: https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

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

#93

Post by heyjamesknight »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #86
bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> Why can we only think about one thing at a time? Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in…

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 them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.

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

#94

Post by Ghostt8117 »

mjburgess wrote: post #46

> If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 2^20 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less. This is an extrinsic d…

This type of comment is my least favorite on HN. "Seems quite trivial," "non-sequitur to compare them," "foolish." I am not able to read the paper as I do not have access, but the published perspective has 131 citations which seem to consider everything from task-specific human abilities, to cortical processing speeds, to perception and limb movements and eye movements, and so on.

I'm glad you thought about it too, but to assume that the authors are just silly and don't understand the problem space is really not a good contribution to conversation.

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

#95

Post by GeoAtreides »

lccerina wrote: post #89
GeoAtreides wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers cited and used in calculations are supported by citations. The purpose of this paper is not to test a hypothesis, or to gather new data, but to think about existing data and new directions of research. This is spelled out in the paper's abstract, which is kind of summary of the whole paper, useful to get a very quick idea about the paper's purpose -- expanded further in the paper's introduction and re-vis…

Thank you for explaining what an abstract is... The fact that those number come from a citation doesn't make them true. This is a badly written paper that a decent researcher wouldn't have written (and I know that the author has many papers, I am speaking about this one) and a decent reviewer would have rejected. A paragraph about Elon Musk? Guesstimates on information rates? As a blog post would have been okay-ish,…

>The fact that those number come from a citation doesn't make them true

it does make them the citated paper problem, though.

the guesstimates are explained as guestimates, and used as illustration for possible upper limits.

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

#96

Post by Bjartr »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> Why can we only think about one thing at a time? Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in…

I wonder if some people with dissociative identity disorder, or who at least identify as plural, experience overlapping simultaneous trains of thought

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

#97

Post by aziaziazi »

Asraelite wrote: post #73
MrMcCall wrote: post #33

The only time 'bits' will ever be an appropriate measure of human processing is when we are processing or producing diginal information artifacts, e.g. a typewritten document. Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis. That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender. No one is male OR female. We are, every single o…

Bits are a perfectly acceptable way to measure biological information processing. These are not the boolean logic digital bits like on a computer. They're the more abstract concept of a bit in information theory. Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system can be in (accounting for statistical uncertainty/biases if needed), take the base 2 logarithm of that number, and you have the bits of informatio…

> Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system

Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.

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

#98

Post by VyseofArcadia »

MrMcCall wrote: post #88
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit is the fundamental unit of information theory, and has nothing to do with digital logic in this context. No one is saying "ok use one bit to encode male or female". No one is saying "ok 101 means serotonin, and 110 is dopamine". What they are saying is that the information content produced by a human being can be compressed down to about 10 bits per second, but this is a statistical description.

You said both nothing to do with digital logic in this context and compressed down to about 10 bits per second Sounds like digital compression from where I sit, friend. Are you using an information theory that is based upon something different from Shannon's?

"Compression" here is nontechnical, and I was using it by analogy as an aid to intuition. I didn't want to throw out the E word (entropy) unnecessarily.

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

#99

Post by VoodooJuJu »

Bits are a unit of measurement we use in relation to computers. Humans are not computers. Do not use bits to measure anything in relation to humans. Stop thinking of humans as computers. It's dehumanizing, unhealthy, and a very narrow way to think of people. Using a computer model for humans is useless at best and misleading at worst.

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

#100

Post by tsimionescu »

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 to each other. You also pick up the fact that it's a Rubik's cube and not a bird or a series of binary digits or English text. If an orange cat lunged at your Rubik's cube while you were studying it, you wouldn't process it as "face 3 has 4 red squares on the first row, then an orange diagonal with sharp claws", you'd process it as "fast moving sharp clawed orange cat attacking cube". Which implies that every time you loom at the cube you also notice that it's still a cube and not any of the millions of other objects you can recognize, adding many more bits of information.

Similarly, when you're typing English text, you're not just encoding information from your brain into English text, you're also deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. Not to mention the precise mechanical control of your muscles to achieve the requisite movements, which we're having significant trouble programming into a robot.

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