A friend had a little accident the other day that could pretty much be attributed to a slow reaction… and i was thinking about it in terms of lag, like if he was playing a computer game and had a high ping… haha… anyway…
If you could rate the nervous system in Mbps… what would it rank at? Is there even a possible comparison? Can you even guesstimate?
I can imagine the spinal cord has a huge amount of bandwidth, considering the eleventy billion bodily functions going on right now as i type this, its gotta have a huge amount of bandwidth…
has anyone ever considered this? can it be guesstimated?
A little over 200 mph, IIRC is the speed that a signal travels along the nerves. Since the reactions are electro-chemical, as opposed to purely electrical, it goes a lot slower than it would in an electrical circuit.
No citation for this, it is merely a memory from my neural psych classes. So I’m pretty sure this research has been done, so you won’t be on a wild goose chase should you decide to look it up.
ye about 100 meters per second is what i remember from biology too.
you cant think of our nervous system in terms of MBPS imho.
computers run a code, one insutruction at a time.
brains dont even have code. the code is the hardware itself. and there ain’t no clock to synchronize anything like there is in a processor. all 14 billions or so neurons go at the same time
aside from speed at which impulses travel there is also a number that shows how many impulses can pass per second, because a neuron needs to recharge so-to-speak by repolarizing the membrane. i dont remember that number. but i guess you could start from there.
You just need to break down the human counter-parts into equivalant computer parts. For example, not all impulses go straight to the brain, like when you burn your finger, you move first, feel it second. So, this would basically be equivalant to a system in which no one CPU controls everything in its entirety. Kind of like in a huge network environment where you have redundant servers that automatically back each up and when one fails the other seamlessly picks up. And, a message is sent to the computer wherever a system administartor is available.
All this done on a smaller scale of course.
But, going by what was said in reference to the electro-chemical reaction of a neuron, this will determine your bandwidth. This is similar to the transmitters and recievers in a fiber-optic network. The bandwidth can be influenced by the transmitter, reciever, frequency of the light, the tranmitting medium, etc. But, after doing some careful study some time ago on this, the limiting factor was primarilly the reciever. The reciever will recieve the pulse of light, which will hit upon a charge-coupled device, or a base of a transistor, etc. Either way, after the pulse is recieved, the energy has to drain to a level where the next pulse recieved will be acknowledged and repetitive pulses will not build such a charge that it can’t drain the energy in time at all. And, the max rate that the reciever can charge and discharge is your bandwidth. Just so you know the time it takes the reciever to build the charge and then dissapate the charge is not related at all.
So, to simplify things, the time it takes a neuron to recieve its “pulse” dissapate that energy, and the recieve the next pulse will be the pulse repitition rate (PRT) and I believe 1/PRT is your pulse repition frequency (PRF) which is directly related to bandwidth.
I’ve read / heard about certain neurotoxins that affect you faster than the nervous system can transmit the data…
Something along the lines of “you get hit by a dart, and you’re actually dead before your brain registers it…”
From what I understand, the poison acts faster than the nerve impulses… any truth to this? Granted I’m sure the lag time between dart and death is measured in fractions of a second…
The poison has to get to the nerves (or other part of the body that it is affecting) in order to do something. Your myelinated nerves (the fast ones) certainly transmit faster than your blood flows. Hence, I’m quite dubious about that statement.
In any case, “…you’re actually dead before your brain registers it…”. If that’s a meaningful statement, then define “dead”, please.
Some of the speeds listed here seem too slow IMHO.
A few years back my company introduced a new type of electrical systems in our cars where instead of the starter being activated immediately at the turn of the key, there is a 70 ms delay as the computer system boots up, and security codes are checked.
When we first got these cars, every time I went to start one I would turn the key and think, “Oh shit the battery is dea” and the car would start to crank.
So in 70/1000 of a second the nerves in my right hand have sent the signal that the key is in the start position, and my brain had started to get out the thought that the car was not responding, and that the probable cause was a bad battery.
