The brain works at more than 10 bits per second

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41593-025-01997-0

A recent article makes a claim with far-reaching implications for neuroscience, technology, and society: that the human brain is subject to an information processing ‘speed limit’ of 10 bits per second. Although this speed limit appears to hold for high-level cognitive functions, we argue that unconscious processing for real-time control of movement, which occupies a majority of neurons in the central nervous system and accounts for most of the information throughput of humans, substantially exceeds this limit.