We are slow-thinkers!

A study at California Institute of Technology in 2019 revealed that humans think at an average speed of 10 bits per second despite having over 85 billion neurons in the brain

Hyderabad: The brain is the most complex structure in our body that controls every process that regulates body functions by interpreting, sending, and receiving different signals to control different processes, including breathing, sleep, thoughts, memory, emotions, motor skills, and so on.

It’s always been believed that our brain shows a tremendous information processing capability. However, when scientists tried to measure these capabilities through various activities such as reading, writing, playing a musical instrument, solving Rubix Cube, it was found that brain’s maximum capability is less than 50 bits per second, despite the fact that our body sends information at the rate of 11 million bits per second to the brain.

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Similarly, when it comes to thinking, our brain is even more slower. A study at California Institute of Technology in 2019 revealed that humans think at an average speed of 10 bits per second despite having over 85 billion neurons in the brain.

The large number of neurons should have made our brain, technically, more powerful in thought process, yet it has a limit. And this limit shows that while our senses send hundreds and thousands of inputs to the brain, we can’t have more than one thought going in our mind at a time.

This brought the scientists to the conclusion that humans are not multi-taskers, as we often think we are. The brain can’t engage in more than one task at the same time. Instead, it rapidly switches between two tasks. But, as our brain is a slow thinker, it takes its own sweet time to switch between tasks if one is more focused on a particular task. Several experiments have found that people slow down when they have to switch between multiple tasks, which negatively impacts performance.

Meanwhile, scientists have blamed our ancestors for the 10 bits per second thought process, as it is believed to be enough for them to survive.