It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.
If you extend your arm straight out to point for example, that's significantly more than ten commands sent at once to your arm muscles. It's just non-conscious. That test measures a bunch of things all together too. Visual processing, color recognition, and conscious decision to act. I got just under 240, and considering everything I had to do, that's pretty neat.
Can you point me to the book that says that "Booleans" are encoded in the human brain just like in a binary computer and they take exactly 1 bit to store? I mean, why not assume error correction, while we are at it, or some kind of compression algorithm that reduces the size further?
If that sounds ridiculous to you, you are beginning to get it. Every single brain cell works on electric potential (a continous value). Not a single one of them can be said to be in the "zero" or "one" state (a discrete value).
"bits of information" doesn't mean 1's and 0's. "bits" is a measure of entropy.
If you send an analog signal over a wire and the receiver on the other end can distinguish between 1024 different voltages reliably, then you sent 10 bits of information. Even though you sent neither a 0 nor a 1, but an analog voltage.
It's about the "information" as an abstract concept, not about how that information is encoded as data sent over some medium. I can send you the same thing thousands of times. I would have sent you lots of data, but 1000 copies of the same thing still only contains as much information as a single copy does.
But on the other hand, a "fast" debator from a high school debate team can process 260 words per second while compressing that down to notes, while simultaneously queuing up meaningful responses, while evaluating which/what to go with for a particular audience/judge, while listening for mistakes from their opponent. If you distill bitrate down to serialized responses to a canned psychometric task, sure, but why do we think that's the total throughput? It isn't, trivially, if we inspect what people do every day.
According to psychology research on human perception there is indeed something that you could call buffered IO in the human brain.
It's used in theories to explain why you can hear your name in a short sentence in a crowded room and then know what the sentence is. Including one or two words before your name. While if your name wasn't said, no attention is diverted to that sound and the "buffer" contents get dropped without retrieving the information.
Yes, and there's different buffers with different capacity for different types of perception according to these theories. Look up Baddeley & Hitch for details. I would guess there are similar buffers for other senses that didn't make it in the lectures in college.
This might be the worst possible way to measure the net throughput of conscious decision making I've ever seen. A wildly ecologically invalid, serialized discrimination task.
Now take someone navigating a social situation with three simultaneous participants, actively listening, coordinating body language, interjecting, responding to questions... and you have a human being operating at a "bitrate" of information that is so many orders of magnitude removed from this bullshit psychometry task as to prompt the question: "what the actual are they talking about".
Using a computer analogy to try to understand the brain functions is ok as long as we remember that the brain is not actually one of them. There have been different technological analogies throughout history including hydraulic systems, telegraphic and telephonic lines, all of them might seem comical today but they were the best explanation at the time, same will be in the future with ours, comparing something like the brain (or rather the whole living being) to a mathematical processing device is more than short sighted. We try to explain everything from the engineering point of view by isolating things but that’s not how life or the universe works.
> or can it process them with some amount of parallelism
I guess someone with two boxes handy could set them up next to each other and run two copies of this test to see if their reaction time holds up or if it lengthens?
EDIT: mine suffers greatly on dual wield: 225 -> 320 ms
I'll have a good think about whether we can process things in parallel or only in series the next time I decide to walk and chew gum while bouncing a ball, not tripping over things, and staying out of traffic.
Mh, balance that ball on your finger while keeping it in spin or dribble it between your legs while spinning your body around and see how many conscious decisions you make while not stepping into canine feces.
> EDIT2: typing at 90 wpm is 1,5 wps, or <10 bps according to Shannon (~1 bit per letter, 5 letters per word)
People can type way faster than 90 WPM, we talk about bitrate of the hardware here its the same even if you haven't practiced typing. And typing is still not what our consciousness is made to do, we have way higher bitrate than that when doing more native tasks such as running in the woods. You can't run in the woods without consciously thinking about each step and deciding where to put your foot next to not hurt your ankle and not collide with trees, that has a massive bitrate.
Running in the woods supports TFA: 180 steps per minute * 16 possible locations per step = 12 bits per second; maybe there are fewer or more possible footfall spots but no matter what it's more than 1 bit per second and less than 100. (and way less than 1e9)
It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.