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Old 18th December 2001 | 18:06
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Icarus
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Joined: Jun 2001
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Post More on the Speed of Thought

The original thread is closed but I did say I would come back on this one!

Better late than never I guess!!

Can we consider this?

Can we understand a ‘thought’ to be the result of the coming together of several neural impulses? That is to say that there is electrical activity in our brain whilst we are thinking and that activity represents our thoughts or rather the components of.
If so,
A neural impulse can travel at between 1 to 100 meters per second (a long way off the 299,337,984 meters per second (186000 miles/second) that light travels at I admit).
Now, if a thought comprises of several neural impulses, and understanding that the brain is non-linear in its processes (i.e. we enter the world of parallelism) surely the following is valid:
Let’s assume ‘one’ particular thought consists of (evolves from?) 2,993,380 separate neural impulses (and as there are anywhere between 10,000,000,000 and 100,000,000,000 neurons in the brain that should be likely) all travelling at 100 meters per second; then that thought was created at a speed equivalent to 299,338,000 meters per second; which in my book is faster than the speed of light.

The original thread is can be found here:
http://www.pprune.org/cgibin/ultimat...c&f=3&t=002373
Icarus is offline