For as brilliant as the human mind can be, there are still limitations that hinder the potential of our brains. The most baffling instance of our mental shortcomings is related to how we think. Despite the brain boasting billions of neurons that dictate our every move, humans have a surprisingly constrained thought process, and scientists may now have answers to explain this mystery of human inefficiency.
A new study recently published in the journal Neuron has quantified the speed of human thought, demonstrating an anomaly in brainpower. The study comes from the California Institute of Technology, where researchers working in the laboratory of biological sciences professor Markus Meister study neuronal circuits — in other words, groups of interconnected neurons that communicate with each other, facilitating functions of the body and mind.
The Limit Behind Our Thoughts
In the study, graduate student Jieyu Zheng examined scientific literature on human behaviors from reading and writing to solving Rubix cubes, crossing this analysis with knowledge of information theory — a mathematical field focusing on how information is processed, stored, and transmitted.
