this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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Bullshit. just reading this and comprehending it, which is thought, far exceeds 10 bits per second.
Speaking which is conveying thought, also far exceed 10 bits per second.
This piece is garbage.
You'd be surprised how litle information you need to do too much. 10 bits seems a little low to me tok, but that's splitting things into 1/1024th every second. Not bad.
There was a study in 2019 that analyzed 17 different spoken languages to analyze how languages with lower complexity rate (bits of information per syllable) tend to be spoken faster in a way that information rate is roughly the same across spoken languages, at roughly 39 bits per second.
Of course, it could be that the actual ideas and information in that speech is inefficiently encoded so that the actual bits of entropy are being communicated slower than 39 per second. I'm curious to know what the underlying Caltech paper linked says about language processing, since the press release describes deriving the 10 bits from studies analyzing how people read and write (as well as studies of people playing video games or solving Rubik's cubes). Are they including the additional overhead of processing that information into new knowledge or insights? Are they defining the entropy of human language with a higher implied compression ratio?
EDIT: I read the preprint, available here. It purports to measure externally measurable output of human behavior. That's an important limitation in that it's not trying to measure internal richness in unobserved thought.
So it analyzes people performing external tasks, including typing and speech with an assumed entropy of about 5 bits per English word. A 120 wpm typing speed therefore translates to 600 bits per minute, or 10 bits per second. A 160 wpm speaking speed translates to 13 bits/s.
The calculated bits of information are especially interesting for the other tasks (blindfolded Rubik's cube solving, memory contests).
It also explicitly cited the 39 bits/s study that I linked as being within the general range, because the actual meat of the paper is analyzing how the human brain brings 10^9 bits of sensory perception down 9 orders of magnitude. If it turns out to be 8.5 orders of magnitude, that doesn't really change the result.
There's also a whole section addressing criticisms of the 10 bit/s number. It argues that claims of photographic memory tend to actually break down into longer periods of study (e.g., 45 minute flyover of Rome to recognize and recreate 1000 buildings of 1000 architectural styles translates into 4 bits/s of memorization). And it argues that the human brain tends to trick itself into perceiving a much higher complexity that it is actually processing (known as "subjective inflation"), implicitly arguing that a lot of that is actually lossy compression that fills in fake details from what it assumes is consistent with the portions actually perceived, and that the observed bitrate from other experiments might not properly categorize the bits of entropy involved in less accurate shortcuts taken by the brain.
I still think visual processing seems to be faster than 10, but I'm now persuaded that it's within an order of magnitude.
The problem here is that the bits of information needs to be clearly defined, otherwise we are not talking about actually quantifiable information. Normally a bit can only have 2 values, here they are talking about very different types of bits, which AFAIK is not a specific quantity.
This is of course a thing.
How are you measuring it?
That doesn't really matter, because 1 bit is merely distinguishing between 1 and zero, or some other 2 component value.
Just reading a single word, you understand the word between about 30000 words you know. That's about 15 bits of information comprehended.
Don't tell me you take more than 1.5 second to read and comprehend one word.
Without having it as text, free thought is CLEARLY much faster, and the complexity of abstract thinking would move the number way up.
1 thought is not 1 bit. But can be thousands of bits.
BTW the mind has insane levels of compression, for instance if you think bicycle, it's a concept that covers many parts. You don't have to think about every part, you know it has a handlebar, frame, pedals and wheels. You also know the purpose of it, the size, weight range of speed and many other more or less relevant details. Just thinking bicycle is easily way more than 10 bits worth of information. But they are "compressed" to only the relevant parts to the context.
Reading and understanding 1 word, is not just understanding a word, but also understanding a concept and putting it into context. I'm not sure how to quantize that, but to quantize it as 1 bit is so horrendously wrong I find it hard to understand how this can in any way be considered scientific.
You are confusing input with throughput. They agree that the input is much greater. It's the throughput that is so slow. Here's the abstract:
He's not.
Executive function has limited capacity, but executive function isn't your brain (and there's no reasonable definition that limits it to anything as absurd as 10 bits). Your visual center is processing all those bits that enter the eyes. All the time. You don't retain all of it, but retaining any of it necessarily requires processing a huge chunk of it.
Literally just understanding the concept of car when you see one is much more than 10 bits of information.
I think that we are all speaking without being able to read the paper (and in my case, I know I wouldn't understand it), so I think dismissing it outright without knowing how they are defining things or measuring them is not really the best course here.
I would suggest that Caltech studies don't tend to be poorly-done.
There is literally nothing the paper could say and no evidence they could provide to make the assertion in the title anything less than laughable.
There are hundreds of systems in your brain that are actively processing many, many orders of magnitude more than ten bits of information per second all the time. We can literally watch them do so.
It's possible the headline is a lie by someone who doesn't understand the research. It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that it resembles reality in any way.
That is quite the claim from someone who has apparently not even read the abstract of the paper. I pasted it in the thread.
It doesn't matter what it says.
A word is more than 10 bits on its own.
You know, dismissing a paper without even taking a minute to read the abstract and basing everything on a headline to claim it's all nonsense is not a good look. I'm just saying.
The point is that it's literally impossible for the headline to be anything but a lie.
I don't need to dig further into a headline that claims cell towers cause cancer because of deadly cell signal radiation, and that's far less deluded than this headline is.
The core concept is entirely incompatible with even a basic understanding of information theory or how the brain works.
(But I did read the abstract, not knowing it's the abstract because it's such nonsensical babble. It makes it even worse.)
Again, refusing to even read the abstract when it has been provided for you because you've already decided the science is wrong without evaluating anything but a short headline is not a good look.
In fact, it is the sort of thing that people who claim cell towers cause cancer are famous for doing themselves.
The headline is completely incompatible with multiple large bodies of scientific evidence. It's the equivalent of claiming gravity doesn't exist. Dismissing obvious nonsense is a necessary part of filtering the huge amount of information available.
But I did read the abstract and it makes the headline look reasonable by comparison.
I don't suppose it would be worth asking if your professional field was neurology...
Argument to authority doesn't strengthen your argument.
A piece of paper is not a prerequisite to the extremely basic level of understanding it takes to laugh at this.
So essentially what you are saying is that you have no expertise in neurology and have not read the paper or evaluated any of the data or the methodology and yet, despite all of that, you know for certain that it is wrong.
Please explain your certainty. And if you appeal to "common sense," please note that common sense is why people thought the sun orbited the Earth for thousands of years.
No, I am saying that I do have a meaningful working knowledge of how the brain works, and information theory, beyond the literal surface level it would take to understand that the headline is bullshit.
You don't need to be a Nobel prize winning physicist to laugh at a paper claiming gravity is impossible. This headline is that level. Literally just processing a word per second completely invalidates it, because an average vocabulary of 20k means that every word, by itself, is ~14 bits of information.
You are already not using 'bit' the way it is defined in the paper. Again, not a good look.
The paper is not entitled to redefine a scientific term to be completely incorrect.
A bit is a bit.
And now it's "it's the paper's fault it's wrong because it defined a term the way I didn't want it defined."
Yes.
Science is built on a shared, standardized base of knowledge. Laying claim to a standard term to mean something entirely incompatible with the actual definition makes your paper objectively incorrect and without merit.
Cool. Let me know when you feel like reading the paper since Aatube already showed you they are using it properly. Or at least admitting you might not know as much about this as you think you do...
From a cursory glance it seems at least quite close to the definition of a bit in relation to entropy, also known as a shannon.
No I'm not, I read that part. Input is for instance hearing a sound wave, which the brain can process at amazing speed, separating a multitude of simultaneous sounds, and translate into meaningful information. Be it music, speech, or a noise that shouldn't be there. It's true that this part is easier to measure, as we can do something similar, although not nearly as well on computers. As we can determine not only content of sounds, but also extrapolate from it in real time. The sound may only be about 2x22k bit, but the processing required is way higher. And that's even more obviously way way way above 10 bit per second.
This is a very complex function that require loads of processing. And can distinguish with microsecond precision it reaches each ear to determine direction.
The same is the case with vision, which although not at all the resolution we think it is, requires massive processing too to interpret into something meaningful.
Now the weird thing is, why in the world do they think consciousness which is even MORE complex, should operate at lower speed? That idea is outright moronic!!!
Edit:
Changed nanosecond to microsecond.
As I suggested to someone else, without any of us actually reading the paper, and I know I do not have the requisite knowledge to understand it if I did, dismissing it with words like "moronic" is not warranted. And as I also suggested, I don't think such a word can generally be applied to Caltech studies. They have a pretty solid reputation as far as I know.
I'm not fucking reading a paper with such ridiculous claims, I gave it a chance, but it simply isn't worth it. And I understand their claims and argumentation perfectly. They simply don't have a clue about the things they make claims about.
I've been investigating and researching these issues for 40 years with an approach from scientific evidence, so please piss off with your claims of me not understanding it.
Without evaluating the data or methodology, I would say that the chance you gave it was not a fair one. Especially since you decided to label it "moronic." That's quite a claim.
Right? They do nothing to expand upon what this plainly wrong claim is supposed to actually mean. Goddamn scientists need a marketing department of their own, because the media sphere in general sells their goods however the fuck they feel like packaging them.