Transcript:

So, Scientific American this week reported that researchers from Caltech have mapped out the speed of thought. And the speed of thought is an incredibly slow rate of 10 bits per second. That's it—10 bits per second is the speed of thought. Even though the information that we gather from our surroundings is much, much higher rate than that, up to millions of billions of bits per second. But the mind processes it as a thought at the rate of 10 bits per second, which is also only in certain situations, life-threatening situations that 10 bits per second processing speed kicks in. Otherwise, life is moving at much slower speed than that in terms of thought. Can you imagine all these people who do fast Rubik's cube, etc., are just at 10 bits per second? It's fascinating. The paper is brilliant; read it.