think slow, act fast: why human brains are a lot lazier than we think
New research shows that far from challenging computers when we think, we seem to operate at a much slower pace than scientists expected.
According to Singularitarians and AI superfans who believe that one day, our minds will live in the cloud as a virtual entity, one of the signs that "superintelligence" is on the horizon is that computers will be able to function like the human brain but much, much faster, compressing a year of human cognition into minutes. At first blush, the idea sounds plausible. So, what if I were to tell you that your phone is not just faster than your conscious, active cognition, but tens of millions of times faster?
Our brains have always been compared to whatever was the most sophisticated and complex technology of the day. From clocks, to telegraphs, to telephones, to radios, to now, computers, whatever made people scratch their heads to fully grasp, it was a perfect analog for the inner workings of the mind.
When comparing our brains to computers, people tend to think in terms of gigahertz and terabytes. Surely we can process and analyze the world around us at a blistering speeds. There's no way that we… oscillate between 10 and 50 bits per second, or up to 50 Hz in cortices used for deliberate cognition? It seems so impossibly slow that it boggles the mind. Well, not too quickly, of course, but it's still mind-boggling.
This is mostly because we're coming at it from the standpoint of comparing brains to computers working with CPUs that function at up to 9.12 GHz. Inside those CPUs are logic gates which cycle electrons at a blistering pace to perform everything we ask of them. What these gates do are, fundamentally, some form of adding in rather creative and complicated contexts through just seven types of gates printed on a microscopic scale into silicon wafers.
Our brains are wet, squishy mazes of neurons and glial cells which signal each other with electricity to release neurotransmitters, and operate mechanically. There are no logic gates. The topology and chemical signaling of neuron clusters determine what they do in the grand scale of the brain and how, and they're under selective pressure to become as efficient as possible, since the brain eats a fifth of your energy needs, and if possible, it would like to use these calories elsewhere or not at all.
So, say the researchers, it seems that the brain has high speed pathways which can process and react at a gigabit per second because they have to keep up with what's happening around us, but for high level, abstract cognition, we don't need to rev our brains at full throttle but can instead utilize evolutionarily optimized paths and decide on how to act in response to external stimuli beyond just reflex.
This also explains why despite our bosses and culture expecting us to multitask — I'd argue because they're so used to comparing our brains to machines that are built for parallelization and multi-threading — we're so incredibly bad at it. Our minds are just not wired to handle it, switching from task to task while desperately trying to hold on to the required context for each in our short term memories as we do.
If you were to compare your brain to any sort of technology, it would be to a vast grid of field-programmable gate arrays that work by consensus and use tubes pumping a complex cocktail of chemicals instead of electricity and webs of logic gates. A weird, oxymoronic combination of jury-rigged and fine tuned mechanisms which evolved at different times and rates. And so, it makes sense that the human mind doesn't follow the logic of a purpose built device except by accident, and inconsistently.
See: Zheng, J., Meister, M. (2025) The unbearable slowness of being: why do we live at 10 bits/s? Neuron, Vol. 113, No. 2, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008
