THINKING SLOWLY: THE PARADOXICAL SLOWNESS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Humans think at a rate of 10 bits per second. Our bodies' sensory systems gather environmental data at a rate of a billion bits per second, 100 million times faster than our thought processes. It is unknown why humans are only able to think a single thought at a time rather than many at a time in parallel the way our sensory systems work. One theory is that the brain was first evolved for navigation - it would make sense that we can only follow one 'path' of thought at a time if our brain evolved from a simple system to follow paths.