The speed of thought

What is the speed of thinking a word, a phrase, and a sentence to their complete completion?

What is the speed of zero thought to the start of a first thought? Like is it faster than the speed of sound?...Is it faster than the speed of light?

Keep in mind thought is visual-imaginative as well as also mentally spoken in your mind if you're a rational person in operation of the human being.

Also if you think (mentally speak) this sentence:

"Soon as I get home!"

^^Do you also make/get a visual-imagination with it? Yes or no? If you were to discribe what you just imagined, did it even have to do with you getting home or not?

[edit on 28-8-2008 by Mabus]

In theory thoughts are light/electricity. So you would get the speed of light for thoughts (Yet slightly slower, but pretty darn close)
In theory, everything is vibrations, and light energy. Either light or the absense of light.
Hence When you think, light, and vibrations are sped threwout your body.

Hence thought is light.. In theory.

In essence we are light energy that vibrates threw an unknown unknown.
All we sense are 5 senses. We can not know these things, and they escape human logic. Our minds set up limits.. When this life has no limits.
Its hard to understand something, when we understand so little.

Our bodies may not be real, our minds may not be real.. They sure feel real. However that may not be the truth of the matter.
We can all say we know, just as I am right now.. But do I?
I dont claim to give you 100% right on answer.. Just that thoughts are based upon who and what we are, We honestly dont know who and what we are right now.
We barely understand the base root of light and where it comes from.

[edit on 28-8-2008 by zysin5]

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.

It, Uhhhh (slober slober) dependeded on Uhhhhhh (Twitch jerk) whooooo nyouuuu R. I dooondt (slober slober) dink dat my brnain Uhhh,....

Nebermine, I fogot whud I be dinking (slober, spitle, puke......fall asleep)

It's as fast as the exchange of sodium ions within the synaptic gap and this varies depending on the nerve in question. It's not anywhere near the speed of light however.

For example...

In order for a signal to get from your brain to your hand it takes an average of a few hundred milliseconds from intent to action for an average distance of say 1.5 meters.

(1.5 meters) per (300 millisecond) = 18 km/h

Much much slower then the speed of light or sound.

[edit on 29-8-2008 by sardion2000]

[edit on 29-8-2008 by sardion2000]

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.

[edit on 29-8-2008 by sardion2000]

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.

Some experiments have shown that areas of the brain associated with certain thoughts do activate before the conscious thought arises, and even before the stimuli is given.
It's a mistake to measure the process in a mechanical way when the brain more than likely works on a quantum level with processes happening outside of time.