One thing that struck me while reading through the research — thoughts happen fast, but awareness seems slower, more spacious.

Maybe that gap between the signal and the noticing… that’s where consciousness lives?

It's one thing to interpret there's a baseline related to this, it's another to propose that there is an ontology of non-consciousness that takes part. None of the concepts can be measured outside of consciousness. Even weight, height, length, charge, velocity - these things are all abstractions of the mind. Zooming in on the brain isn't much different from simply thinking deeply, nor would traveling through outer space between galaxies would be much different than doing it in the sensory deprivation tank, in the sense that the distances and the speeds are not categorically different, just bigger or smaller and of different (but really the same) "matter" organization.

Oh, this is a fun thought. I've always had a hard time with percieving myself alone, so your question - "where does you begin?" - is one I've never chewed on before.

Electricity exists everywhere, doesn't it? That's how stuff like static electricity zaps you and whatnot? What seperates "my" electricity from the air immediately around my head? Do I start at all, or is there merely a threshold for what electricity is interpretable? Could I read the nonsensical patterns in the air, in an old TV, in a broken massage chair, if I had the right apparatus? Could I interpret the thoughts of the sun?

What would we even do if, despite the many differences, the "readings" came out much like our own - what if the universe thinks and is simply illiterate to interpreting itself? What does that mean for us? Nothing. I did not make my own blood cells, they just happen to do something I can't do on my own. But I do love them.

Interesting point. Makes me think that without embodiment in its original state, the essence of our being might still be too volatile and uncontrolled and this could be the reason for reincarnation. Meditation heals. Reincarnation is real.

This is a fascinating line of thought — the idea of consciousness riding dynamic waveforms that span the whole brain resonates deeply. The way you describe sensory input nudging or disrupting that baseline waveform feels like a model that blends both science and lived experience.

I’ve also been wondering if consciousness isn’t just riding those waves, but quietly shaping the ocean they move through — not just reacting to the stimuli, but informing the resonance pattern itself over time.

Makes me think… maybe awareness is what calibrates the system when the waves get too noisy, too dull, or too chaotic. And maybe meaning is just resonance, rebalanced.

10bps doesn't pass the smell test. The visual cortex alone directly ingests & filters vastly more data than 10bps

How much cognitive function do I spend when I walk through a doorway and then proceed to attempt to remember my existence?

So in mph what is that?

Scientists have measured the speed of human thought and found that it's surprisingly slow: 

• Speed The brain processes information at a rate of about 10 bits per second. This is millions of times slower than the rate at which the body's sensory systems gather data, which is about a billion bits per second. 
• Implications This "speed limit" suggests that the brain filters sensory data to focus on the most important information. It may also explain why humans can only process one thought at a time. For example, a chess player can't envision multiple future moves at once. 
• Evolution The brain's slow speed may be a result of evolution. Early organisms with nervous systems used their cognitive abilities to navigate their environment and escape predators. 
• Future implications Understanding how the brain evolved could help improve artificial intelligence. It could also help us understand the benefits of slowing down and approaching the world one question at a time.

Caltech Press Release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior

Research paper: https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0

Color perception is such a wild interplay of biology and cognition! Beyond the retinal cones detecting wavelengths (roughly 400-700 nm for red, green, blue), the brain’s visual cortex (V1 and V4 areas) integrates these signals with context to achieve color constancy. For example, the lateral geniculate nucleus relays raw data, but higher-level processing in V4 adjusts for lighting based on surrounding cues, like shadows or adjacent colors. This is why a red apple looks “red” at dusk or noon—your brain’s compensating like a built-in photo editor.

I've been saying conscious intellectual imagination has a tick rate of 10hz for years, there's a bunch of comments about it in this profile from a while back.

The reason "you seem to only be able to focus on one thought at a time" is because the computational mechanism which seems responsible for the production of consciousness only needs one conscious executive "track" to yield the intellectual benefits of the system. More than one would be a waste of resources, and would arguably still just be one track if they were procedurally integrated in memory anyway. So either you just add one more layer of integration to the single track of consciousness, or you have a second consciousness living in your head which is unable to control the body to the degree of being able to communicate its presence to you, in which case you still just "experience one thought at a time".

If you add more conscious information processing capacity with a BCI, it will just add layers and breadth of complexity to the "one thought at a time", it won't feel like there's more thoughts, just more complex ones that result in faster intelligence, not because the tick rate is increased, but because it would take less steps to achieve confidence and decisions. You already have multiple analyses being processed into a single memory image every tenth of a second, it's just that there's only one memory image made of the conglomerate analysis.

If you wanted a faster conscious intellectual imaginative tick rate for some kinds of processing, we should probably start by adding an artificial processing module set to process faster, but then tokenizing 10hz sections of the stream and adding those tokens as an extra dimension of information to the natural, 10hz processing system.

Hard to believe that figure - it amounts to approx one ‘word’ per second - try telling that to a bunch of kids, they run at multiple times that rate.

Plus of course humans do so much processing in parallel.

In unrelated news, Speed of trump's thought measured as 1/C.

The brain is a computer analogy is nice sometimes, but it doesn't work in many cases. Information isn't stored in a neuron or at synapses per se, and we're not certain exactly how information is stored in the brain at this point.

Best we can tell information recall happens as a product of simultaneous firing of neuron ensembles. So, for example, if 1000 neurons all fire at the same time we might get horse, if another 1000 neurons fire we might get eagle. Some number of neurons might overlap between the two animals, but not all. Things that are more similar have more overlap (the percent of the same group of neurons that fire for horse and eagle might be higher than horse and tree because horse and eagle are both animals).

With this type of setup, the end result is much more powerful than the sum of parts.

Edit: I did not have time to answer a lot of good comments last night, so I am attempting to give some answers to common ones here.

1. I simplified these ideas a ton hoping to make it more understandable. If you want a in depth review this (doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0493-1) review is recent and does a nice job covering what we believe about memory retrieval through neuronal engrams. It is highly technical, so if you want something more geared to the non-scientist I suggest the book ‘Connectome’ by Sebastian Seung. The book isn’t entirely about memory recall, and is a slightly outdated now, but does a nice job covering these ideas and is written by an expert in the field.
2. My understanding of computer science is limited, and my field of study is behavioral neurochemistry, not memory. I know enough about memory retrieval because it is important to all neuroscientists , but I am not pushing the field forward in any way. That said, I don't really know enough to comment on how the brain compares to non-traditional computer systems like analogue or quantum computers. There are some interesting comments about these types of computers in this thread though.
3. Yes ‘information’ is stored in DNA, and outside experience can change the degree to which a specific gene is expressed by a cell . However, this does not mean that memories can be stored in DNA. DNA works more like a set of instructions for how the machinery that makes up a cell should be made and put together; the machinery then does the work (which in this case would be information processing). There are elaborate systems withing the cell to ensure that DNA is not changed throughout the life of a cell, and while expression of gene can and does change regularly, no new information is added to to the DNA of a neuron in memory consolidation.

EDIT: I found this article where-in the authors predicted neuronal synapses contain - on average - 4.7 bits of information. I haven't read it in detail, but it seems they based this off synaptic plasticity - the ability for a synapse to change it's size, strength, etc. - specifically the breadth of synaptic phenotypes. The introduction is brief and gives a good overview of the subject. Also, here's the abstract (emphasis mine):

> Information in a computer is quantified by the number of bits that can be stored and recovered. An important question about the brain is how much information can be stored at a synapse through synaptic plasticity, which depends on the history of probabilistic synaptic activity. The strong correlation between size and efficacy of a synapse allowed us to estimate the variability of synaptic plasticity. In an EM reconstruction of hippocampal neuropil we found single axons making two or more synaptic contacts onto the same dendrites, having shared histories of presynaptic and postsynaptic activity. The spine heads and neck diameters, but not neck lengths, of these pairs were nearly identical in size. We found that there is a minimum of 26 distinguishable synaptic strengths, corresponding to storing 4.7 bits of information at each synapse. Because of stochastic variability of synaptic activation the observed precision requires averaging activity over several minutes.

Easy answer: We don't know for certain, and it depends on a lot of factors and the "type" of information.

Long-winded ramble that mostly stays on-topic: Basically, it depends on how you define "information". In the broadest sense, information is data about a system that can be used to predict other states of the system. If I know that I dropped a ball from 10 meters on Earth, I have two pieces of information - height and Earth's acceleration - and can thus predict that the ball will hit the ground in just over a second. If I just say, "I drop a ball", then there's less information since you can no longer reliably predict when it will hit the ground.

To get a bit more grounded, each cell contains millions of bits in the nucleus alone, thanks to DNA. Ordered cellular systems - e.g. cytoskeleton, proteins, electrochemical gradient, etc. - can also be said to contain information; e.g. proteins are coded by RNA which is coded by DNA. But I think you're driving at the systemic information content of the brain; i.e. not just ordered systems, but computational capacity, in which case it's more appropriate to treat neurons as indivisible units, the fundamental building blocks of our brain computer.

A single neuron can have thousands of synapses, both dendritic (receive synaptic signals) and axonal (send synaptic signals). However, a neuron typically is an "all or nothing" system that is either firing or not firing; this is analogous to a bit of information, which is either a 0 or a 1. Knowing this we could conjecture that each neuron is one bit, but then we have to account for time. In other words, some neurons can fire dozens of times per second, while at other times they may fire once in several seconds. This is important because rapid firing can have different effects than slow firing; e.g. if the sending neuron is excitatory, then it sending rapid action potentials to another neuron will make that neuron more likely to fire its own action potentials. However, if the sending excitatory neuron only fires a handful of times per second (i.e. relatively slow), the receiving neuron won't receive enough stimulation to fire its own action potential. So the speed of action potentials also carries information. Then we get into different types of synapses; broadly, we can categorize neuron-to-neuron synapses as excitatory or inhibitory: excitatory makes the receiving neuron more likely to fire, and inhibitory makes them less likely to fire.

To recap so far: we have to consider the number of neurons, the number of synapses on each neuron, the rate at which their firing action potentials through those synapses, and what type of synapse it is. But wait, there's more!

We've only talked about pairs of neurons, but most neurons receive and/or project synapses to dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of neurons. Let's consider a typical pyramidal neuron found in the cortex. For simplicity, we'll say it receives 10 action potentials over a short period of time; 3 of them were from inhibitory interneurons, and the other 7 were from excitatory neurons. Excitatory action potentials make it easier for the neuron to fire, and since it received more excitatory action potentials it will likely fire. In other words, there is computation going on inside the neuron as its biochemistry reacts to the incoming action potentials, computation that determines if the excitatory input exceeds the action potential threshold, and whether inhibitory input is strong enough to negate this.

So now we have to consider the ratio of synaptic inputs and their firing rate. Then you have to factor in all kinds of other variables, such as the size of the neuron, it's resting membrane potential, the types of synaptic receptors, whether it sends excitatory or inhibitory neurotransmitters, and so on. All of this computation just to decide whether the neuron is a 0 or a 1.

The last thing I'll put forward is that our brain is exceptionally good at compressing information. We receive ~11 million bits of information per second, but cognitively we can only process about 50 bits/second. Think about all of the different sensations you could focus on: touch, temperature, hunger, those socks you're wearing, tiredness, vision, hearing, thought, etc. We focus on one at a time because that's all we can handle (our brains barely have enough energy to light a refrigerator light bulb, so they have to be very economical with processing); our brain's job is to filter out all of the superfluous information so we can focus on the important stuff. For example the visual system receives tons of information every second from our high-resolution retinas; these signals are conveyed to our visual cortex and broken down into base components (e.g. a house would be decomposed into straight lines, angles, light/dark areas, etc.), then integrated into more complex objects (e.g. a square), which are then integrated with context and knowledge (e.g. large square in this place is likely a house), and finally awareness (e.g. "I see a house"). Instead of having to think through all of that computation and logic consciously, our visual and integration cortices handle it "under the hood" and just give "us" (i.e. our conscious selves) the final output.

Remarkably, we can somehow store far more than 50 bits. We don't know "where" memories are stored, but we do know that certain neuronal firing patterns are associated with different information. For example, neuronal circuits are often firing at a specific frequency that changes based on your thoughts, behavior, environment, and where you are in the brain; e.g. your brain "defaults" to a 40Hz (40 times per second) frequency of firing when you zone out and stare off into space; alpha rhythms (~10Hz) appear when you close your eyes; etc. These may be byproducts of other computations, or they may be computations in and of themselves; to oversimplify, a 20Hz frequency in a certain circuit may encode "dog", but a 30Hz may encode "cat" (possibly by activating neuronal circuits sensitive to the individual frequencies).

There's so much more I could talk about on this, but I have to move on, so let's put it all together.

Neurons can either fire or not fire, which intrinsically encodes information. The rate at which they fire also encodes information, as well as the type of neuron, the number of synapses, the number of currently active synapses, the signal polarity (i.e. inhibitory or excitatory), and many other factors. Computationally, neurons generally try to streamline information to reduce processing burden. Depending on where in a brain circuit you are, the neurons may be conveying very granular information or very consolidated information. Regardless, information content of a given synapse or neuron is so context-dependent - on the neuron, the synapse, the circuit it's a part of, etc. - that you'd need to be very precise in defining the system before you could begin crunching numbers to make predictions.

Neurons don't work like individual bits of a data in a hard drive. They basically work all of their memory from association. It's based on the concept of "neurons that fire together, wire together" and vice versa. It's best explained with an example. I'll use "horse" since another comment mentioned it. When you hear the word "horse" you probably have dozens of neurons all firing in recognition. They are each in different locations if your brain related to different aspects of memory. Example, let's say when you were a child you went to a petting zoo and saw a horse for the first time.

• In the speech center if your brain, a cluster of neurons associated with the sound of the word "horse" light up.

• Somewhat nearby, other auditory neurons are hearing a horse whinny for the first time and they are all firing as they process the sound.

• In your visual memory center, neurons associated with learning the basic image/shape of a horse will fire.

• In the sensory part of your brain, neurons that are tasked with remembering the smell of that horse stable will light up

And so on. When you first encounter a horse, neurons in each of those parts of your brain (touch, sound, shape, etc) will all be firing. And since "neurons that fire together, wire together" a link gets formed between each group of neurons. Then in the future whenever any one individual neuron in that link gets activated, the entire chain fires up because, again, "neurons that wire together, fire together". So when you are walking by a farm and hear a distant horse whinny, or catch the faintest smell of the stable, and your entire related nerve cluster of horse name-look-smell-sound immediately fires and you know there's a horse over there.

It's a fairly effective and robust system of memory, but it doesn't translate well to bits on a hard drive. How many bits would your horse memory be? Is it just the X amount of neural connections between various memory neurons? Even that's not a good representation because some neurons have hundreds of connections and are triggered for various different memories. (For example the sound of a horse whinny might be triggered by neuronal clusters for memories about "horse" but also be used for recalling knowledge about "generic animal sounds")

Trying to quantify exactly how much knowledge a brain holds is a nearly impossible task because some extremely simple "memories" are actually requiring tens of thousands of neural connections, while other single neural connections might account for a dozen different "memories".

It would be like working with a hard drive where some bits are actually several megabytes of data, and other groups of millions of bits form only one kilobyte.

TLDR Brains store vast sums of experience in a fairly simplistic form that is effective, but it's a form of memory "storage" that is wildly inconsistent in regards to trying to quantify just how much actual data it contains.

Any attempt at trying to compare a brain to a computer hard drive just breaks down because they are working with utterly different concepts of how data is stored. To use one last analogy, it would be like asking "how many descriptive words does a painting hold?". The answer is impossible to define.

>How much data is really stored per synapse (or per neuron)?

A synapse or a neuron is not a bit. Instead, the data appears to be stored in neural pathways consisting of neurons connected by synapses. If you play with simple polygons, connecting their vertices in all the possible ways, you'll quickly see that the number of possible connections grows faster than the number of vertices.

But I don't think we have a good, 'mechanistic' or 'instrumental' grasp on how memories are stored in, or by, the brain.

Not once was the concept of parallel processing mentioned.

The optic nerves would need to be similarly enhanced, but otherwise yes, they would.

Or so goes the conjecture. We have no way to predict such a subjective experience. It would require experimental confirmation to be sure. But from what we know of the brain and nervous system the answer is yes.

We don't really know, the origins of human time perception are still a pretty knotty affair, with lots of analogies taken from computer visuals, talking about the frame rate of consciousness vs the visual cortex. But generally speaking, what we already know suggests that the visual cortex seems to be clocked faster than our conscious perceptions of moments, meaning that the brain is already batching together a large number of rapid perceptions into the time we experience.

So it's also possible that they would see things at the same subjective speed, but with 10x more detail, I say this because when we look at people's experience of "time slowing down" in extreme events, often the slowed perception of time is accompanied by tunnel vision and loss of colour. This suggests a hypothesis that the brain isn't actually "running faster" in extreme situations, it's still perceiving at the same rate on a low level, but is throwing away more information about the environment that is less likely to be helpful.

So just as people whose perception is tuned in the right way can perceive a piece of art in great depth, seeing lots of its patterns and details at once, we might expect that some people would just throw away less elements of any given scene, but perceive time at more or less the same rate, just in larger "chunks".

Assuming everything needed for recieving and processing became fast like the spinal cord and other nerve lines, then yes. I forgot how I calculated this, but apparently our brains would fill up with information, useful or unnecessary, in less than a minute if we stored every piece of information our body takes in, so they would pretty much die on the spot but if they just forgot all that stimuli quickly, then they would live.

It is like watching golf while playing baseball

No. You said specifically receive and process. Let me put it this way, if a factory has a lane that is enough for one truck of raw material to come in ajd it can turn that raw material into something in a day, you have your base.. If that factory gets 9 more lanes and gets 9 more machines to process it, it still makes all of it in a day, it just makes more.

Now.. If you gave it 9 more machinss but no morr raw material, it still would make the same amount it did before, but in a tenth of the time.

Translate that into brain stuff and you get your answer. If we receive and process things 10 times faster, it would all be the same, we would not experience any time dilation, but we would be able to process all that new information.. Dont know where that information comes from tho.

Now, if we are able to process it faster but we receive the same, or if there is a limit on what is there to receuve, then yeah, that would be a "slomo" experience.

Conversely, if we had for example, our optical nerves enhanced but not our capabilities to process more information, we would probably go blind as fuck as we wouldnt be able to process it all ajd there would be a "backlog" of image data, all colliding into itself into a perpetual electric signal.

I process information slower or doesn’t compute at all…

Ooof if this is true, this would explain the times I’m still haunted by the times I didn’t know what to say or do in response to bad news

So this could explain the numb feeling?

Yep, everyone always assumes I’m emotionless or I’ve even been called hard to read many times, but I honestly feel a lot more then people realize

Legit my step siblings mom is going through a divorce and when I was told this info I was just like in a tone of minimal sadness and just not caring "Oh neat" than I realized what they said and then I was like in the same tone "Damn, that sucks" then I proceeded to ask what it would be like if we made hotdogs

Given that the brain does a lot of parallel processing, I think it is likely that a 10x faster brain would do 10x more stuff at the same speed as a normal brain.

They'd see the apple fall at normal speed but also be thinking about tonight's dinner plans and many other things.

They'd be able to easily hold multiple full speed conversations about difficult topics.

And so on.

Seems like they would be closer to living in the true present. I tend to view the present as the inflection point between the future and the past, with our minds perceiving reality as close to the edge of the future as possible, but always doomed to live sightly in the past. A person with 10x faster thought would be living 10x closer to true reality.

It's hard to reconcile them ruminating 10x faster with not perceiving time as subjectively slower.

>and thus have to be replayed at the same rate it took those others to execute their visual acts and to speak their auditory syllables.

Quicksilver would have no flicker fusion and might have individual favorite frames of Infinity War.

>They’d never communicate emotionally.

There are times where returning rudeness is the socially correct response. Both your friends and your enemies will be very confused if you do not, and trust me, you don't want to forget to be visibly angry sometimes because that's just part of the human networking protocol.

There is also a case for the idea that someone with unlimited time to consider their response might still choose to say mean things. Look at all the spicy Reddit comments.

Them perceiving time slower would be the best interpretation. The only way for us to imagine making 10 seconds worth of decisions and movements before the apple hits the ground is that it was falling slower. Obviously this would feel like the "normal" passage of time for them.