Are you a quick thinker? Some scientists set out to answer this question for humanity, and it turns out that the answer is a resounding NO.

Two researchers at Caltech wanted to figure out how fast humans think. To do this, they first had to define what they meant. What exactly qualifies as a thought, and how much information does it contain?

To do this, they decided that they would focus on looking at how fast the brain can convey information, which is measured in a unit known as a Shannon (after Claude Shannon, one of the pioneers of information theory.).

Associate Professor at Telecom Bretagne, Vincent Gripon explained what this is in a translation for The Conversation:

“To understand the concept of information, it is essential to differentiate it from that of data. Let’s take an example. I have a friend who has just given birth. I send her a text message to ask her the sex of the newborn. In my vision of things, there is an equal chance that it will be a boy or a girl. Her response will therefore send me exactly one Shannon. To answer me, she will probably send me a sentence made up of several characters, each represented by several bits. I will therefore receive several dozen bits of data for a single Shannon.”

To put this into a more practical understanding, we all know that our brain receives massive amounts of data every second. This is in the form of our senses including what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. Our brain filters the vast majority of this information out since it is of no use to us.

The small portion of the information that is deemed important is then acted upon through thought, which is what the study, which was published in the journal Neuron, looked at. While it would be interesting to understand the mechanism used by the brain to filter through all the data it receives, that is not what this study was analyzing.

So, what did they come up with?

About 10 bits per second. This is a shockingly slow speed. Even the oldest computers operated far faster than this. So, how can that be? The team in the paper explained:

“How can humans get away with just 10 bits/s? The tautological answer here is that cognition at such a low rate is sufficient for survival. More precisely, our ancestors have chosen an ecological niche where the world is slow enough to make survival possible. In fact, the 10 bits/s are needed only in worst-case situations, and most of the time our environment changes at a much more leisurely pace. In particular, our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: The vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior, and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio – about 100,000,000 – remains largely unexplained.”

So, it seems that we really are very slow thinkers, at least when it comes to our active thoughts. When it comes to gathering and processing useless information, however, our brains are lightning fast. Which I suppose makes sense.

I knew I was a slow thinker, but this is crazy.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.