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Comment by klausa | Hacker News Reader

>Human brains only run at 100Hz and I responded in realtime, so most of the work must have been precomputed.

Is the 100Hz some metaphor I'm not getting? Or is it something that's actually a fact? If it's the latter, does anyone have more informations about this, because it sounds really fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it.

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It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.

We can evaluate a lot of things that are one inferential step away, because of the parallelism. But we're very bad at bridging more than a few inferential steps because parallelism is almost of no use there. It's very difficult for a human brain to think a few chess moves ahead, but incredibly easy to dismiss a thousand obviously stupid moves in a fraction of a second. The human brain has to precompute almost everything in order to function.

I had to look this up to. Here is an interesting chunk:

EEG researchers are noticing extremely high brainwave frequencies above Gamma, at up to 100 Hz. Totally opposite speed brainwave frequencies - some at 100 Hz and others at less than 0.5 Hz - have exactly the same states of consciousness associated with them. These high-range brain frequency states are named HyperGamma. Later information showed new evidence of frequencies even higher than this, at almost 200 Hz.named: Lambda brainwave frequencies and states of consciousness.

http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html

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