The New York Times: “In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world. Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 25 million bps. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps. Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps. They titled their study, published this month in the journal Neuron, “The unbearable slowness of being.” “It’s a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” said Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the study. “If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow.”