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Comment by fzeindl | Hacker News Reader

Could the 10bits be some sort of instruction-set-address-width?

Meaning that while you are solving the rubik‘s cube, your brain has the capacity of switching into one of 2^10=1024 possible next states, which might fire nerve impulses for the body and also come with a new set of 1024 next states?

When focusing on the cube about 20 or 30 of the next states could be related to the cube, while the rest is concerned with bodily sensations, other thoughts etc.

What if learning something well meant that less states need to be reserved for the task/cube at hand because the decision tree going forward has become more efficiently packed, so more states are open for something else.

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THe 10 bits is just very obviously made-up nonsense. The brain doesn’t operate on anything like a binary system, sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data. Even the abstract kind of answers its own question. It says sensory data is something like the order of 10^9 bits per second but the “information throughput” is 10 bits per second. It asks “why do we need billions of neurons to process 10 bits per second?” Well we clearly don’t because that’s clearly not what we do. We process 10^9 bits per second, and we do a bunch of things which aren’t just processing sensory data as well. And on top of that we do things which aren’t measured in the 10 bits per second also.

> sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data

That might be correct but as far as I know the brain has circuits that fire periodically with a certain frequency (what brain waves are about). If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.

> If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.

What makes you think that this is the case? If someone touches you from behind do you immediately fall over dead from sensory overload? Do you react as if you where punched in the gut? Do you look over your shoulder to check who it is? Or do you fail to notice it until they break a bone? There is a significant amount of inputs where the reactions are not just zero or one but happen on a scale, your digital 1 or zero is more likely to be a 1.0 or 0.0 of a numeric type with unknown bit depth, lets go with 80bit since x87 is just the worst and completely blows the 10bit claim.

> What makes you think that this is the case? If someone touches you from behind do you immediately fall over dead from sensory overload?

My point was not that reactions/feelings etc are switched by a signal being 1 or 0, just that sort-of-digital signals (line "on" or "off") are possible within the brain.

My idea about the instruction-set I was talking about earlier was not that it immediately switches behaviours on or off, but that it selects the next, slightly different or deeper "brain circuits / loops" to get activated and shift the whole apparatus towards finally acting out a certain behaviour.

But, as you point out, that is all unfounded speculation.

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