Thanks to @General_Effort@lemmy.world for the links!
Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior
Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
You may be misunderstanding the bit measure here. It’s not ten bits of information, basically a single byte. It’s ten binary yes/no decisions to equal the evaluation of 1024 distinct possibilities.
The measure comes from information theory but it is easy to confuse it with other uses of ‘bits’.
What? This is the perfectly normal meaning of bits. 2^10 = 1024.
Only when you are framing it in terms of information entropy. I think many of those misunderstanding the study are thinking of bits as part of a standard byte. It’s a subtle distinction but that’s where I think the disconnect is
Yes, the study is probably fine, it’s the article that fails to clarify before using it, that they are not talking about bits the way bits are normally understood.