The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

A brief review by Rachel Nuwer in the Scientific American points to an article by Zheng and Meister with the title of this post (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me).  

I pass on an initial clip from Nuwer's review and then the abstract of the Zheng and Meister paper: 

PEOPLE OFTEN FEEL that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human brain communicate directly with a computer, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking or writing.

If Musk succeeded, he would probably be disappointed. According to recent research by Zheng and Meister published in Neuron, human beings remember, make decisions and imagine things at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed of about 10 bits per second. In contrast, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion bits per second. 

This biological paradox, highlighted in the new study, probably contributes to the false feeling that our mind can engage in seemingly infinite thoughts simultaneously—a phenomenon the researchers deem “the Musk illusion.”  

The Zheng and Meister astract: 

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s   . In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢0⁹ bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this.