“The human prefrontal cortex alone contains enough neuronal hardware to run 5000 [fruit]flies.” Meanwhile mine can’t even keep me from shitposting on Bluesky after a couple of beers. Cool paper from @mameister4.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHVa3BtfH... - ThreadSky

carlbergstrom.com • 162 days ago

“The human prefrontal cortex alone contains enough neuronal hardware to run 5000 [fruit]flies.”

Meanwhile mine can’t even keep me from shitposting on Bluesky after a couple of beers.

Cool paper from @mameister4.bsky.social

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHVa3BtfH9BQG

Comments

krikalitika.bsky.social•161 days ago

Post pandemic I’m definitely running on lower FfP

mounty.bsky.social•162 days ago

I think my fruit flies are a few fruits short of a picnic

rosemyne.xyz•161 days ago

This paper has been on my mind since yesterday—could the brain ever parallel process with external help? While the paper is skeptical of Neuralink and other technologies, we know the brain adapts to new tools. Could it treat a computer as an extension of itself, offloading memory or aiding thought?

rosemyne.xyz•161 days ago

Even without computers, how might we enhance the brain to process beyond the 10 bits the paper suggests? The argument is strong but assumes much. It cites chess, yet a single game would require vastly more bits for a computer to process than the human mind seemingly uses for one train of thought.

rosemyne.xyz•161 days ago

I’ll admit, this isn’t my field of study, but it’s fascinating—and confusing. I may have misunderstood parts or let my bias creep in, but while the brain is inefficient and flawed, I’m not convinced the paper is entirely right, especially since it doesn’t propose any real solution to the issue.

jerry-lundegaard.bsky.social•162 days ago

it's crow o'clock, cut yourself some slack

chrisadami.bsky.social•162 days ago

10^9 bits of *entropy* impinge on our brain/s, not information. Our brain finds 10 bits of information/s in all that entropy. That's hard. Why not more? We can't make decisions faster than that: a bit more than 3 per s. If we can't use information faster than 10 bits/s, why extract it? Not worth it.

carlbergstrom.com•162 days ago

This pretty much exactly is my take-home from the paper. What's interesting is that it's worth collecting all that entropy.

chrisadami.bsky.social•162 days ago

A bit of information might hide within a million bits of entropy. By processing all that entropy you increase your chances of finding that bit, which may be the difference between life and death.

urubu.bsky.social•162 days ago

i'm not sure that comparison to fruit flies feels like a compliment. i feel weird about it. i'd have to get my facts straight to solve that problem, tho. 4 example: is it true that flies have no memory? hence why they bounce on windows, as in... oh, imma leave thru here. oh, imma leave thru here.

jillykid.bsky.social•162 days ago

📌

carlbergstrom.com•162 days ago

I didn’t realize that Marcus’s coauthor @jieyusz.bsky.social was on Bluesky as well. My bad!

jieyusz.bsky.social•157 days ago

Thank you for posting about this, fellow bird lover!

damngroundhogs.bsky.social•162 days ago

Time is the gods’ version of punctuation…(we’re in the oxford comma stage so everyones a bit out of sorts)…

fergalwhatever.bsky.social•162 days ago

Oh! I will now be rating all my friends in kilo fruit flies.

windlandlady.bsky.social•162 days ago

Or barely ounces of fruit flies 😂

ilisabat.bsky.social•162 days ago

I must be misreading or misunderstanding. The authors insist repeatedly that we operate at 10 bits/sec, but in Table 1 they list a wide variety of activities that far surpass it (object recognition, speech, reading).

And stenographers routinely clear 300 wpm!

carlbergstrom.com•162 days ago

They’re trying to explain an eight order of magnitude gap. Half an order of magnitude doesn’t matter at all.

ilisabat.bsky.social•162 days ago

Ah. I'm approaching this like a lawyer instead of a scientist, I see. So the question is less "why is this the limit" and more "why is there such a huge discrepancy between this and the 'hardware' of the brain?"

ilisabat.bsky.social•162 days ago

(I'd love to be corrected on what I am assuming is my lack of comprehension, since this seems well-written.)

talos-xliv.bsky.social•162 days ago

This is one of the most excellent examples of self-deprecating, academic humor I've ever read.

Serious question: Given your expertise, approximately how many crows or ravens would our prefrontal cortex power? As a non-expert layman, I'm guessing it's close to 1:1

carlbergstrom.com•162 days ago

I agree with you!

talos-xliv.bsky.social•162 days ago

Thanks, Professor! I wasn't sure, but it seemed about right.

p.s. Have always loved your crow/raven photos (even going back to the other place), and also keep a copy of "Calling Bullshit" handy here in my study.

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

I guess I need to read this paper now that it's been shared so many times. Is it really a conundrum that sensory systems are so much faster than thought? The maximum capacity of the PNS doesn't reflect the actual Shannon information generated by the sparse, repetitive world. 1/

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

It is certainly important to recognize changes, which could occur at any time, and to recognize them with low latency. But between these rare changes, there's rarely a lot of new information. Couldn't the CNS be calibrated to the ecologically appropriate time-scale of high-level information? 2/

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

Furthermore, as we know from the revolution from parallel to serial data in engineered systems, there are massive benefits to cramming everything into a single physical channel just so long as you can communicate fast enough on that channel (much faster than central processing of info). 3/

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

And even earlier than that, signal processing realized that if you can over-sample signals, you can massively re-shape the noise floor. This is how 1-bit ADC's (like delta-sigma converters) can capture high-quality, high-resolution audio with codes of only 1-bit depth. 4/

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

It seems like it would be a real conundrum if it were the other way around -- if thought were orders of magnitude faster than sensing. Them being equivalent seems unlikely. And we know there are tremendous benefits of sensing being faster than thought. 5/

tedpavlic.bsky.social•162 days ago

But maybe the conundrum will make more sense after reading the paper. But thought being slower than sensing certainly seems adaptive. 6/end

everydayhuman.bsky.social•162 days ago

Super Interesting, this paper keeps scratching my mind too.

I kept thinking about the slit experiment and fields. Entropy is an interesting thought. 😊

twitskeptic.sirvin.com•161 days ago

That paper was interesting, but I was surprised that they didn't consider energy consumption as a limiting factor on information output. 80% of the ~20W consumed by the brain is used for neural signaling of the ~10% of the active neurons at a given time. That's 20% of energy used by a human at rest.

twitskeptic.sirvin.com•161 days ago

So increased neuronal signaling for increased parallelism is expensive and perhaps increased information throughput was selected against in favor of lower metabolic activity.

twitskeptic.sirvin.com•161 days ago

They also seemed to occasionally confuse information content with information capacity. For example, they use the ratio of visual info *capacity* to output information content to come up with their 10^8 information input to output ratio. But the information input to the retina is rarely 10^9 bps.

zoonotic1.bsky.social•162 days ago

We we are basically an OG Nintendo.

kzcomments.bsky.social•162 days ago

corpus callosum - slower in men...why they're hunters...one job at a time....

cdotmcnaughton.bsky.social•162 days ago

📌

lisasmuffins.bsky.social•162 days ago

Those of us with 5,001 fruit flies (i.e. Oxbridge graduates) are provably superior.

luvnabroknclock.bsky.social•162 days ago

You're looking at it all wrong. Sure, infinite monkeys with infinite time won't bang out Shakespeare apparently, but 5K fruit flies should be able to shitpost in the internet. Mathematically speaking.

thatidiotmonro.bsky.social•162 days ago

Joke's on you. I'm actually 5000 fruitfulness in a trenchcoat.

thatidiotmonro.bsky.social•162 days ago

Fucking autocarrot.

zoonotic1.bsky.social•162 days ago

I didn’t even notice the typo until your second post. I read it as fruitflies. I’m not sure if my brain making that correction means I’m operating somewhere close or way less than 10 bit/s.

godless2.bsky.social•162 days ago

Somewhere down the evolutionary tree, fruit flies and hoomans have a common ancestor.

jrfound.bsky.social•162 days ago

Same only my shit posting after a few glasses of wine is far less intelligent. I just fight over the best eggs and people’s choice of donuts 😂.

ctmccartney.bsky.social•162 days ago

Omg. I'm not going to be able to stop thinking about this now! Why are we so shit when our brains are so powerful?

kevinjkircher.com•162 days ago

*taps temple* 5000 fruit flies, m'dudes, all buzzing around right up here

natanael.bsky.social•162 days ago

"inside you are 5000 fruitflies"

xanaxides.bsky.social•162 days ago

One of them is evil, one is good, one is silly, one is strenuously vapid, one digs sin, one likes maracas… nth likes the word Phoebus… which one will you feed yeast when they love vinegar?

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