Researchers figured out how many bits per second of data the human brain can process

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have uncovered a surprising truth about the speed of human thought: our brains process ideas at a rate of just 10 bits per second. Compared to the billion bits per second our sensory systems gather from the world around us, this is astonishingly slow.

Led by Markus Meister and graduate student Jieyu Zheng, researchers used information theory to analyze behaviors such as reading, writing, and solving puzzles. Despite having over 85 billion neurons...