BLIND SPEEDCUBING BLIPS : MIND PRECIS.

IN blind speedcubing a player looks at a Rubik's Cube, puts on a blindfold and solves it.

At a 2023 competition, the American speedcuber Tommy Cherry needed just 5.5 seconds to inspect his cube, which he then solved in 7.5 seconds. Ms Zheng and Dr. Meister calculated Mr. Cherry information rate during the his inspection : Just 11.8 bps.

Even people with extraordinary visual recall have a relatively low information flow. In a memory sport called the 5 Minute Binary, players try to memorize a long string of 1s and 0s.

They get five minutes to look over pages with thousands of numbers and then, after a 15-minute break, try to recall as much of the sequence as they can.

The world record for this game was set in 2009 by the Mongolian memory champion Munkhshur Narmandakh, who recited 1,467 numbers. Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng estimated that she did this with an information flow of just 4.9 bps.

The speed of human thought is dwarfed by the flood of information that assaults our senses. Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng estimated that the millions of photoreceptor cells in a single eye can transmit 1.6 billion bps.

In other words, we sift about one bit out of every 100 million we receive.

The World Students Society thanks Carl Zimmer.