Science

thomas

The average human reading speed is 249 words per minute, and the average English word has 5.1 characters. So a person reading sustains a processing rate (OCR + comprehension) of 21 bytes per second.

Likewise, the average typing speed is 40 words per minute, or 3.4 bytes per second. We do this by spelling out every letter of every word in the correct order without even consciously thinking about it.

We take reading and typing for granted, but they’re kind of amazing feats to process entirely on wetware

A few days ago, I marveled at how effortlessly the human brain can perform non-trivial tasks such as reading or typing glyphs while simultaneously processing their meaning. And yet, reading is considered a relaxing activity, not even stretching our cognitive abilities much! 1/8

A few days ago, I marveled at how effortlessly the human brain can perform non-trivial tasks such as reading or typing glyphs while simultaneously processing their meaning. And yet, reading is considered a relaxing activity, not even stretching our cognitive abilities much! 1/8

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Increasingly, the answer appears to be that the human brain operates like *both* a macroscopic classical system and a microscopic quantum one simultaneously.

In statistical physics terms, the brain is said to operate near a critical point, much like water at the edge of boiling (phase transition), a nuclear reactor nearing a sustained chain reaction, or an ordered classical system bordering on the chaotic behavior of a non-linear system. 3/8

In practice, it means that the brain exhibits classical, quantum, and chaotic properties all at once.

For example, neural avalanches happen at every scale of distance and time across the cortex, with no preference for any. This is called scale invariance, and it is reminiscent of the self-similarity we observe in fractals independently of scale (coincidentally, there is some evidence that neuron microtubules are organized in fractal fashion). 4/8

Another observed property is the low effective dimensionality (few degrees of freedom) of the brain's structure, which allows for long-range coherence across the brain. This could explain the non-local and fast spread of information across the cortical networks despite the high latency of individual neurons mentioned above. This long-range coordination (instead of mere signal propagation) is somewhat reminiscent of quantum entanglement and "spooky action at a distance" between particles (not saying this is what's happening here). 5/8

Zooming out, the growing body of evidence points toward the hypothesis that long-distance and long-lived quantum coherence happens in the brain, and that the robust, non-computable collapse of quantum states contributes to conscious events.

This would support the original "orchestrated objective reduction" (Orch-OR) theory that consciousness is an emergent property of the quantum processing (literal qubits) inside the microtubules, rather than a byproduct of the connections between neurons ("objective reduction" here is synonymous with collapse of the wave function). 6/8

More research is required, but it's exciting to see the quantum consciousness theory of Orch-OR continue to gain credibility 30 years after its formulation by Sir Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.

Orch-OR also creates a narrow pathway for free will to exist, which would upend my own intuition about the brain being entirely deterministic.

That would make YOU stardust that has evolved into a free-willed quantum computer. If that's not awesome, I don't know what is. 7/8

References / further reading:
- Lay video: https://youtu.be/JSvm9Zg2Xik
- Peer-reviewed article: https://doi.org/g877s7
- Critical brain hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_brain_hypothesis
- Self-organized criticality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
- Orchestrated objective reduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

Also paging resident neuroscientist @christin and wetware enthusiast @kripcat.eth

8/8

Expanding on this — how is it possible that the human brain performs lighting-speed computations, such as estimating the trajectory of the ball in a game of tennis or driving a car on the freeway while holding a conversation, given the high latency of inter-neuronal communication (on the order of 10–20 ms)?

Furthermore, how does it make sense that our modest wetware operating on low power and potassium-sodium exchanges can outperform silicon chips at such mundane tasks? 2/8

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If you took all the outliers — the greatest artists, writers, mathematicians, athletes, etc of all time and put them in a room, I think it’d become more obvious how awesome human performance is at the edge, when deliberate practice combines with natural talent / genetic predisposition. It’s incredible what the brain is capable of at its very best.

It’s the relatively low baseline / average that is the real tragedy

I always say we humans really don’t know how much more we are capable of yet, it’s only visible in a handful of humans and that’s still not full potential.

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Wait I’m struggling with that last sentence

it’s fascinating and super inefficient. also wild: we put our sounds on buttons. we know how to communicate by moving fingers on the buttons. we do me at of our processing with our thumbs on a phone

Not sure if that has been demonstrated on the neurobiological level, but most of the time we seem to be projecting something onto the world rather than genuinely processing it, so in a sense a lot of calculations were already performed before.