The human brain is a beast when it comes to pure analytical power. Its eighty billion neurons form trillions of connections grouped in ways that allow us to sense, imagine, and plan our way through existence with other people by our side.

The speed at which our brains process information is being examined in a new study, and the results show that we are not as mentally fast as we like to think. In fact, the study found that our brains process information at a rate of only 10 bits per second.

The research, conducted by neurobiologists Jieyi Zheng and Marcus Meister of the California Institute of Technology, suggests that this slowness of our brains is a result of the way we internally process thoughts in a single file, which creates a certain congestion, reports rts.rs.

On the other hand, the speed of information processing is in stark contrast to the way our peripheral nervous system functions, which collects sensory data in parallel at ∼1⁢09 bits/s, much faster than our 10-bit cognitive computer.

For Zheng and Meister, this discrepancy between input and processing speed is a mystery.

“At any given moment, we extract only 10 bits out of the trillions that our senses collect, and we use those 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions,” Meister points out. “It’s a paradox: What does our brain do to filter all this information?”

In their recently published work, Zheng and Meister hypothesize that, despite the richness of the landscape in our minds, the existence of photographic memory, and potentially unconscious processing of data, our brains actually function astonishingly slowly, rarely peaking above a dozen bits per second.

As they found during their research, solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded requires just under 12 bits per second of processing. Playing the strategy computer game Starcraft at a professional level – about 10 bits per second. Reading this article – at most 50 bits per second, and that’s temporary.

Assuming the results are correct, neurobiologists believe that the disparity between the processing of external stimuli in our “outer brain” and the calculations of our “inner brain” shows how little we know about our own cognitive abilities.

“Current understanding is inadequate to the vast processing resources available, and we have not seen a single viable hypothesis that creates a neural bottleneck that forces us to think about only one thing at a time,” the authors write.

The human brain is a “beast” when it comes to pure analytical power. Its eighty billion neurons form trillions of connections grouped in ways that allow us to sense, imagine, and plan our way through existence with other people around us.

Fruit flies, on the other hand, have perhaps a hundred thousand neurons, enough for them to find food, flap their wings, and communicate with other flies. Why couldn’t a human brain behave like a swarm of flies, with each unit processing a large number of bits each second together at high speed?

While there are no obvious answers, Zheng and Meister suggest that it may simply have to do with needs. Or, more precisely, a lack of needs.

“Our ancestors chose an evolutionary niche in which the world was slow enough to allow survival,” the neurobiologists say. “In fact, 10 bits per second are only needed in critical situations, and most of the time our environment changes much more leisurely.”

Studies of comparable data processing rates in other species are extremely limited, the researchers explain, although what they found seems to support the view that in general our external environment changes at a rate that requires decisions to be made in only a few bits per second.

Understanding how our brains evolved could give us insights into improving artificial intelligence, and shaping it to fit our own particular neural architecture. At the very least, it could reveal deeper benefits of slowing down and processing one simple question at a time.