processing speed

My cousin Drausin has a post on his fantastic blog (which you should add to your Google Reader right now) about a neuroscience study that finds the human brain processing rate for lexical tasks of 60 bits per second.

But I think the really key point comes from the arXiv blog: "Of course, this is not the information-processing capacity of the entire brain but one measure of the input/output capacity during a specific task."

The brain isn't optimized for lexical tasks like sorting out letters into words or doing mathematical computations. How about something the brain is really good at, like facial recognition? I bet in one second you could look at a photograph of a bunch of colleagues and memorize the names of 5-10 of them who are in the picture. How much processing power does that take? Hard to estimate, but certainly many orders of magnitude greater than 60 bps.

As an aside, the bandwidth from the retina, according to a study cited on wikipedia's retina page, is 8.75 megabits per second. Actually, that's pretty low given that a lot of digital cameras take photos of over 8.75 megabits. The trick of the brain is to make us think our entire field of vision has high resolution when really we're only getting good resolution in the focus of the eye.