How fast is the speed of thought?

How fast is the speed of thought? we perceive things at 24-60fps because of the limits of our senses but how fast does our though go? Whats the fps limit of a thought?

reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman


Dunno the quickest, but I know some people never think - so infinitely slow for some people.

reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman


Thinkin' Fast...

Around 300 milliseconds. That's how long it took a volunteer to begin to understand a pictured object. Add to that another 250 to 450 milliseconds to fully comprehend what it was.


Or...almost as fast as your ability to create threads.

reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman


Click here: You Have An Urgent Private Message.

Originally posted by greeneyedleo
reply to post by John_Rodger_Cornman

 

Click here: You Have An Urgent Private Message.

I never posted a link to a pornographic page while I was here on ATS. Why was I accused of such?

I think that depends on the kind of information and its importance. You can easily test this yourself with a speed reading application. spreeder.com for ex.

Depending on your practice and the topic you can reach some 1000 words per minute. The so called "subconscious mind" can process things at an incredible speed and you would only perceive important information actively.

You can greatly improve you active reaction time if the information is important to you. You may compare it to the way a computer works. If the memory adress is already in a register it can access the memory directly, otherwise it has to fetch the adress form memory. The thougt process seems to work in a similar fashion if you already are into a topic you can use the information without thinking about it.

However there is some sceptisim about the concept of the brain as a computer. Stuart Hameroff has some evidence that quantum effects may be involved at some point.

Thought is timeless.


The speed of thought cannot be measured. One cannot measure if the thought was there before thinking or after.

So if I watch the entire season of star gate (all the seasons) and i was hypnotized. The hypnotist tells me to replay the seasons episodes from the pilot til now(the new season) at 100,000 fps frame by frame. Time being an illusion of your senses/brain would seem to be still going at 24-60fps but in reality its going at 100,000 fps(frame by frame). The hypnotist tells you that the world around you (your senses) are going at thousands of times slower than your "thought TV set".Would you see all the episodes in less than 2 hours?

I don't think so. Even if consciousness would be timeless your eyes are proven to work on a physical/chemical basis. So there should be a bottleneck at some point..

Originally posted by kybertech
I don't think so. Even if consciousness would be timeless your eyes are proven to work on a physical/chemical basis. So there should be a bottleneck at some point..

The question is the speed of thought and not the frequency of sight.

A thought is timeless, but takes time to interpret it in a linguistic or visual thought form.

How fast is the speed of thought?


Well, you've told us now, so thank you

Until I read your post though, I would have been inclined (based on personal experience a few weeks ago) to believe the answer to your question might be: ' Not as fast as reflexes'


Guess I'm wrong, having read your post

but -- few weeks ago, while removing items from the dishwasher, I dropped a very pointy knife. Two thoughts: ' Don't want it to get dirty when hitting the floor' and ' this is going to land in my foot '

A third thought overrode both the above, and that third thought was, ' I'm not going to be able to catch it in time '

I believed I wouldn't be able to catch it

but my reflexes overrode that prophecy -- and grabbed the knife when it had fallen from approx. chest height to about thigh-high


It left my mind/thoughts struggling to catch up. My mind had already 'heard' (in advance) the sound of the knife hitting the floor and had also already 'felt' the alternative -- the pain as the knife landed point down in my foot

I can remember 'feeling' my mind racing to adjust to the fact the knife was there, in my hand

My ears were puzzled -- because the expected 'clunk' of the knife hitting the tiles hadn't happened

and my senses, which had expected the knife may land point-down in my foot -- were also floundering in surprise

So in my case, in that instance, reflexes were at least a match for the speed of thought

means I'm a slow-thinker with fast reactions ? Who knows

if the brain and its synapses are as fast as we say they are. How fast does it take to put a thought together? 100ms-400ms? Can time be "played back" faster than our sensing appendices can record at? Say our visual cortex is limited by 60fps of the eye can a memory(pre-decoded light images) be played back faster than what you see?

Originally posted by Shadow Herder
The question is the speed of thought and not the frequency of sight.

Yep, this was just in respect to the example of watching 10000 fps stargate episodes on a physical tv.

Originally posted by Shadow Herder
A thought is timeless, but takes time to interpret it in a linguistic or visual thought form.

That is open to discussion, I don't think that there is hard evidence ether way except in the metaphysical.

This is an interesting question. What is "thought"? I think that is important, right?

There are sublime communications that can cause one to react quicker than they could think. Consider the deer that "jumps the bullet". There is no way it has time to react to the sound consciously. The body just kind of takes over and acts.

I am a former college football player, and all state lineman for the Lone Star State. One of the things my coaches have always yelled at me is "don't think, react". Once you have taken the time to think, you have wasted your advantage.

Does this mean the body acts without the mind? If so, that creates some interesting propositions.

In the brain, signals are sent via electrical pulse. That would mean that the brain operates at the speed of light, and the speed of "brain thought" would depend on the synaptic response combined with the calculation of light speed travel across them.

But is this where thought actually happens? Or is the brain akin to a modem, sending and recieving information from the mind, which is in a higher place? If this is so, then we have no way to measuring the limits of the mind, as it surely must be capable of acting instantaneously.

And there are legitimate scientific experiments (performed at SRI) that indicate this to be true. Instantaneous, regardless of time and space.

Originally posted by John_Rodger_Cornman
How fast is the speed of thought?

About 10 times slower than the power of speech

a good video to watch about thought is (What the bleep do we know) it has some interesting things, it is quite long but worth it i could not find the section on thought speed i wanted to post sorry

I think a better question, actually, is how fast does the universe run? Like, if it were a movie, how many frames per second would it run at?

Then, reconcile that with concepts such as time dilation.

I like to ponder that when i go to sleep. Been doing it for years, and can't begin to tell you the first thing about it.

Originally posted by John_Rodger_Cornman
So if I watch the entire season of star gate (all the seasons) and i was hypnotized. The hypnotist tells me to replay the seasons episodes from the pilot til now(the new season) at 100,000 fps frame by frame. Time being an illusion of your senses/brain would seem to be still going at 24-60fps but in reality its going at 100,000 fps(frame by frame). The hypnotist tells you that the world around you (your senses) are going at thousands of times slower than your "thought TV set".Would you see all the episodes in less than 2 hours?

Maybe be clearer on what you perceive thought to be. It sounds like you are talking more about what our eyes can perceive with in the visible light spectrum and how fast your brain comprehends what you are seeing as apposed to thinking.

Peace

[edit on 24-5-2010 by letthereaderunderstand]

To measure the speed of thought you first need to define what a thought actually is.
There is no scientist who can answer this question since modern science has no clue of what consciousness really is and how it works.

However I believe there are spiritually developed people who can tell you what the thoughts are, but they definitely won't bother with measuring it's speed.
Personally I don't think that thoughts have "speed" at all.

So I'm afraid your question is a bit pointless unless you change term "speed of thought" to "speed of reaction" or something that modern science is able to deal with (like "frequency of perception" you mentioned).

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
But is this where thought actually happens? Or is the brain akin to a modem, sending and recieving information from the mind, which is in a higher place? If this is so, then we have no way to measuring the limits of the mind, as it surely must be capable of acting instantaneously.

And there are legitimate scientific experiments (performed at SRI) that indicate this to be true. Instantaneous, regardless of time and space.

Actually there are several Layers on which the brain operates.

- At first there is the hard "wireing" between neurons which can change. It is belived to be a chemical process. This should be the slowest.

- Then there is the electrical signaling, here it gets interesting because neurons do not operate on a fixed frequency. They rather behave more like deterministic chaos.

- And (according to Hammeroff) there is the quantum layer inside the neurons. Here it gets complicated because if every neuron may be a small quantum computer.