Bet You Didn't Know: Who Thinks Faster - Our Brain or Our Computer?

The human brain, the remarkable organ that enables us to think, dream, and create, is surprisingly slow. A groundbreaking study conducted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) reveals a surprising fact: our brain processes information at just 10 bits per second - a rate that sounds almost ridiculous in an era where computers process billions of operations per second.

Researchers Jiayu Zheng and Markus Meister discovered a huge gap between the amount of information our body collects and our ability to process it. While our senses capture data at a speed of a billion bits per second, the brain manages to process only a tiny portion of this information. “It’s like passing an ocean of information through a straw,” explains Meister.

The study sheds new light on the multitasking myth. It turns out our brain can only process one thought at a time. Like a chess player who can imagine only one sequence of moves at a time, we are limited to serial processing of information.

These findings pose a significant challenge to the future vision of brain-computer interfaces. Even the most advanced technologies, like those being developed by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, will not be able to bypass this basic limitation of the human brain. “You can connect the world’s most powerful computer to the brain,” the researchers say, “but in the end, the brain itself will remain the bottleneck.”

Perhaps it is precisely the understanding that our brain is slower than we thought that should lead us to appreciate its wonder: despite the processing speed limitations, it succeeds in creating the rich and complex world we experience every moment.