The speed of thought, page 1
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reply posted on 28-8-2008 @ 11:03 PM by truth_seeker3
reply to post by Mabus


If my biology and physics are telling me right. It is the speed which your brain neurons transmit electricity to each other inside your brain. If I am correct, it is slightly slower than the speed of light. Because your neurons emitting electrical pulses cannot travel faster than light.



reply posted on 29-8-2008 @ 02:23 AM by mdiinican
reply to post by sardion2000


This man speaks the truth. Thought is actually pretty slow in comparison to all kinds of things. In computer terms, we process information very slowly. We're so very much smarter and capable than computers, though, because we process everything massively parallel. Our brains are just so complex that we can do all kinds of wonderful and interesting things (for instance, be self-aware sapient beings), despite the comparatively slow speed at which we operate. We don't need to move the information very fast, because we process many things at once.

The extremely slow speed at which our brains operate, coupled with the absurdly parallel processing we use to think is the reason that we're so good at things machines can't do well at all, like recognize patterns and faces and such, but so bad at things computers are great at, like math involving numbers a thousand or more digits in length.


reply posted on 29-8-2008 @ 01:05 PM by spoonbeater
The Brain and Nervous System work in two main ways, Imput and output. Information is recieved through nerve receptors, transduced into an electrical current that travels along the axon of nerve cells and affects an output. e.g The imput could be that you see a ball flying towards your head, the output being that you catch it. You recieve information about the ball from your eyes, this triggers a bunch of nerves in your brain which makes you catch the ball.

Have you ever stopped to think why we have so many sensory imputs on our head; our ears, eyes, nose, mouth(taste) ? Its because of two reasons:

1. The time it takes to relay a information from the receptor to the brain where it is processed.

Many of you might have experienced touching something hot and burning yourself. You may even realise that you moved your hand away from the heat source before you actually started feeling the heat. This is because of simple relay systems. The body has been evolutionarily designed to respond as quickly as possible to such dangers. Nerve signals for heat come from your fingers up your arm to your spinal cord and are relayed back straight to your arm so you move your hand away. It takes too long for the signal to go to your brain and be processed, your hand will be like crispy bacon by then.


2. Increasing the distance of the signal receptors from the brain increases the chance that the connection to the brain could be severed.

If we had eyes on the end of our fingers, well you wouldnt want to loose a finger....


Abstract thought takes place in the brain and the main problem with trying to answer your question is there is no way to quantify the numer of nerve cell connections assosiated with complex thought. As Sardion said, the slowest step in nerve signals is transfering the signal across the synapses, which is done by the diffusion of nerotransmitters.

You can however get a ball park figure by measuring reaction times. A nice one often demonstrated is dropping a ruler between thumb and forefinger and measuring the distance it drops before you can catch it and from that calculating the reaction time.
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