Research suggests that the earliest creatures with a nervous system used their brains primarily for navigation, to move toward food and away from predators. If our brains evolved from these simple systems to follow paths, it would make sense that we can only follow one “path” of thought at a time. "Human thinking can be seen as a form of navigation through a space of abstract concepts,"
The human brain evolved to navigate.
Besides for that, we do not multitask whatsoever. In CPU speak, we are single-threaded and swap them out quickly to appear to multitask, but actually are just swapping fast.
This also leads to what some call “muscle memory”. One cannot land a plane in a crosswind, get a launch alongside in rough conditions, or 100 other things consciously thinking it out step by step. I don’t think muscles have memory, but it seems to me we can farm stuff out to subroutines when quick actions is needed.
From the linked article in the OP:
Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once?
Here’s an article about the brains processing of visual information from a few days ago:
One study showed visual signals are selectively targeted or broadly broadcast, challenging the idea of a simple, linear flow of visual input.
The way I understand this is we are not aware of most of the processing of visual information by the brain. It’s being done at the subconscious level.
If you get deep into photography, you start shooting in RAW mode. This means the saved files are not processed in any way, it is just straight from the sensor. There is a lot that goes in between that and a nice photo, usually the camera does that for you, but if you want more control and better processing than the camera can do, you shoot RAW.
Your eyesight works the same way. “RAW” vision is inverted for one thing. A lot of color correction goes on, we don’t see everything blue-purple tinted outside and yellow tinted inside. There are some clever optical illusion photos around that can trick people into seeing the wrong colors depending on what other colors are around them. Then there is pattern matching: Humans like to assign things to known patterns. This is why my motorcycle is now totalled, car drivers look around, see a bike, and all that registers in their brains is “not car, not a problem”.
Post from Boing Boing on the same topic:
It includes a quote from the NYT:
“Psychological science has not acknowledged this big conflict,” Dr. Meister said. More researchers should ask why we toss out so much information and get by on so little, he said.
Britton Sauerbrei, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in the new study, questioned whether Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng had fully captured the flow of information in our nervous system. They left out the unconscious signals that our bodies use to stand, walk or recover from a trip. If those were included, “you’re going to end up with a vastly higher bit rate,” he said.
But when it comes to conscious tasks and memories, Dr. Sauerbrei said, he was convinced that very little information flows through the brain. “I think their argument is pretty airtight,” he said.
Here’s an article that might be relevant to visual navigation:
Visual features are processed before navigational affordances in the human brain
First sentence in the article:
“To navigate through their immediate environment humans process scene information rapidly.”
This is a quote from the author of the book Talent is Overrated:
“When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.”
— Geoff Colvin
From a previous post: The three stages of the new deck officer
This aligns with the idea of processing conscious information slowly, even if the 10 bits a second is off by a factor by 2 or 3 times or even a factor of 10 it seems correct.