A controversial paper by Zheng Jieyu and Markus Meister in Neuron last year drew a remarkable conclusion. Taking an information theory approach, they argued that many empirical studies confirm that human cognition operates at only 10 bits per second, slightly more than one character per second.
Of course, our senses feed gigabits every second to the brain. Our unconscious brain and internal nervous system (of which we are completely unaware) operate at comparable rates to keep our bodies going and control our muscles.
Zheng and Meister, on the other hand, are talking about the brain’s conscious cognitive functions such as comprehending the words in this article, typing, deciding what to do or say, and so on.
I came across this quite by chance as I read a Scientific American magazine last year, just in time to mention it in the second edition of Learning Engineering Practice. The article helps to explain a crucial concept I emphasize through the book: the difference between knowledge and information.
Many would argue that, in today’s world, we are drowning ourselves in a sea of information, especially since we allowed ourselves to spend hours every day watching screens.
Engineers working on projects, especially large ones, face a torrent of emails every day and vast repositories of digital documents.
So many people confuse information with knowledge. Have you heard that phrase “all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips”?
There is a philosophical distinction here. Documents, untold billions accessible through the internet, represent knowledge that human beings have written at some time in the past. The internet also has even larger stores of machine-created information as well, such as images captured by cameras or created by computers, text regurgitated by large language models like ChatGPT and so on.
So what does this mean for engineering practice?
It’s helpful to think of knowledge as “true, justified beliefs” in our minds. Only knowledge can influence human actions. Information has to be perceived by our eyes and other senses before knowledge can be constructed in our minds. And this transformation from information to knowledge in our minds is what Zheng and Meister have been writing about: it’s incredibly slow.
Think of a four page email attachment: about 1600 words of text, around 10,000 characters. Each character needs 7 bits, but there’s a degree of predictability about text in documents, so the information content of 1600 words is a lot less than 80,000 bits. Add a diagram or two, maybe a single image, and then the information content will likely top 100,000 bits. So, according to Zheng and Meister, your brain needs up to three hours to fully comprehend a typical four page engineering document!
When was the last time you spent even half an hour for every page of a document you received in your email?
In our interviews with early-career engineers, several expressed their frustrations about emails like this: “When I arrived on site, it seemed like no one had read any of the documents I had emailed to them! I had to explain everything all over again, it took so much time!”
Well, Zheng and Meister have a helpful explanation. We all overlook the incredibly slow rate at which information gets transformed into knowledge that guides human actions.
So, next time you have to rely on a written document, think carefully as you write. Can you use 100 words or less? That might take 3 – 5 minutes for someone to comprehend if you ask them “please read this carefully!”. The chances are that at least some of what you write will be comprehended by diligent reading.
A life-long friend who rose to the most senior ranks of the public service suggested this advice. Write just three sentences. The first describes the issue. The second describes the consequences of doing nothing. The third lists corrective actions to avoid any undesirable consequences or seize an opportunity.
It’s really no surprise that project completion performance is declining despite modern information systems holding vast numbers of informative documents. The information is irrelevant until someone makes an effort to comprehend it.
Of course, there’s much more to this than I can write about in a brief article. Beyond ths limit of 10 bits/sec there’s another critical issue.
Knowledge construction is guided by knowledge that we have already constructed beforehand. As I explained in my book The Making of an Expert Engineer, prior knowledge guides all learning. Socrates spoke about this two and a half thousand years ago, according to Plato: “words can only remind us of what we already know”.
Well, that’s a nice topic for another blog article.
I hope you found this interesting. If you have time, send tell me about your experiences that nicely illustrate what Zheng and Meister have helped us all understand.
Reference
Zheng, J., & Meister, M. (2025). The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? Neuron, 113(2), 192–204.
PS: When I saw this article actually posted on my blog, I laughed! My screen said 4-6 minutes reading time. I hope you enjoy the joke!
There has been a little gap since my last blog article. Toby Osmond has run the company for me for the last three years and brought so many improvements. Not the least was his idea for the Coolzy trademark and logo. Toby had to leave Coolzy to take up other opportunities a few weeks back so I have had to learn to run the company once again. Since Toby joined, we expanded into the USA and Europe, so the scale of our operations has increased. It has been a steep learning curve for the last few weeks as I took on additional staff and rearranged the business.
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