This seems wrong. My understanding is that the ~200 spikes/second limit derives from the cell needing to "reload" before firing again, rather than some built in

This seems wrong. My understanding is that the ~200 spikes/second limit derives from the cell needing to "reload" before firing again, rather than some built in latency. Relaying a spike can be very quick indeed. A better conclusion would be that we don't have time for too many recursions in that short a time. Also, I can't think of any particularly hard problem that humans can solve in 0.1 seconds (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law)