The Unbearable Slowness of Being by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Mesiter offers an thought-provoking perspective on sensory inputs and how well your brain uses them — spoiler alert: slowly.
Your wifi may send you information at a 100 megabits per second, that’s about 100 megabits/second, that’s ~100,000,000 bits. Of that 100 million bits, your brain can only process 10 bits/second.
10 bits/second is the speed of “being”. And within a factor of two it is the speed at which your brain can process motor functions, perception, and cognition. The median modern person would freak out if their internet became that slow.
The paper’s authors said that our brain has the capacity to accept 50TB (vastly overestimated upper bound) of information. However, given nature (inputs that come from gene expression) and nurture (inputs that come from our senses), we can only store and use ~4GB —- the amount of information that can be stored on a thumb drive! Those overestimations are highly speculative and we still need more research.
But what about all of this brain capacity that many think is untapped? What if we hooked ourselves up to a robot, would we be faster? The authors argue no because the rate of perception is only 10 bits/second, the speed of being limit is a threshold on the robot’s ability.
I asked myself what happens to all of that information we take in but never use. The authors propose the idea of an inner and outer brain. The outer brain takes in all of the information and begins filtering and sifting through it. Some information is stored, some disregarded, and some is noise . The inner brain is where that speed limit comes in, the 10 bits/second threshold. The inner brain is responsible for grabbing only the most important information that it needs.
I’m left with a few thoughts.
Stop getting upset over slow internet speeds.
We live in a 10 bit/second world — we’ve build our world that way.
Life unfolds at a much faster rate and in powers of resolution greater than our ability to perceive and work with it —- it’s okay to slow down.
Perhaps 2025 resolution? Knowing that our inner brain filters everything down to the essentials, perhaps we can learn to embrace slowness—trusting that we are already processing the most important parts of life.
