Here's a simple reaction test: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime
It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.
It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.
I come in around 250 ms on the latency, which means that to get up to 10 bps I'd need to actually be able to discriminate between 6 choices each time.
To get up to 100 bps?
If that sounds ridiculous to you, you are beginning to get it. Every single brain cell works on electric potential (a continous value). Not a single one of them can be said to be in the "zero" or "one" state (a discrete value).
If you send an analog signal over a wire and the receiver on the other end can distinguish between 1024 different voltages reliably, then you sent 10 bits of information. Even though you sent neither a 0 nor a 1, but an analog voltage.
It's about the "information" as an abstract concept, not about how that information is encoded as data sent over some medium. I can send you the same thing thousands of times. I would have sent you lots of data, but 1000 copies of the same thing still only contains as much information as a single copy does.
And is 100ms (I struggled to get below 180ms, myself) only the time needed to process, or does that include IO latency?
If it includes IO latency, then is there a buffer?
I guess someone with two boxes handy could set them up next to each other and run two copies of this test to see if their reaction time holds up or if it lengthens?
EDIT: mine suffers greatly on dual wield: 225 -> 320 ms
I meant walking, chewing gum, dribbling a basketball, and avoiding traffic.
Driving stick is a good example, as shifting gears requires conscious thought at first and becomes mostly automated with experience.
Now take someone navigating a social situation with three simultaneous participants, actively listening, coordinating body language, interjecting, responding to questions... and you have a human being operating at a "bitrate" of information that is so many orders of magnitude removed from this bullshit psychometry task as to prompt the question: "what the actual are they talking about".
It's used in theories to explain why you can hear your name in a short sentence in a crowded room and then know what the sentence is. Including one or two words before your name. While if your name wasn't said, no attention is diverted to that sound and the "buffer" contents get dropped without retrieving the information.
EDIT: see appendix A.3 Perception
Then consider something more complex like drawing, you draw way way way more than 10 bits a second.
EDIT: not the expanded bit rate, the optimally compressed bit rate, if that makes sense?
EDIT2: typing at 90 wpm is 1,5 wps, or <10 bps according to Shannon (~1 bit per letter, 5 letters per word)
That’s kind of a cop out - at what point do very quick conscious decisions become “automatic.”
People can type way faster than 90 WPM, we talk about bitrate of the hardware here its the same even if you haven't practiced typing. And typing is still not what our consciousness is made to do, we have way higher bitrate than that when doing more native tasks such as running in the woods. You can't run in the woods without consciously thinking about each step and deciding where to put your foot next to not hurt your ankle and not collide with trees, that has a massive bitrate.
Before you say it does not require decisions - you can have friendly fire on.
IO is the problem not processing power.