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?