3 ms·
I broadly agree with the premise, but this section seems fishy: >"Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow spe
by Night_Thastus 2y ago
I broadly agree with the premise, but this section seems fishy:
>"Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (approximately 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower, or half our available bandwidth."
Source? I was under the impression that the brain's processing is a lot more complicated than that and you couldn't reduce it to something so simple as 'bits per second'. Plus, during the average conversation, there must be enormous sums of data being processed - like the author mentions. Body language, tone of voice, social concerns, smell, sight, etc. There's no way that's a mere '60 bits' per second.
- Earw0rm 2y agoI think 15 bytes/sec refers to our ability to parse and process text, or spoken words "as if they were text" (i.e. ignoring emphasis, intonation and so on).