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Visualizing Ethernet Speed
anthemaniac writes "In the blink of an eye, you can transfer files from one computer to another using Ethernet. And in the same amount of time, your eye sends signals to the brain. A study finds that images transferred to the brain and files across an Ethernet network take about the same amount of time." From the article: "The researchers calculate that the 100,000 ganglion cells in a guinea pig retina transmit roughly 875,000 bits of information per second. The human retina contains about 10 times more ganglion cells than that of guinea pigs, so it would transmit data at roughly 10 million bits per second, the researchers estimate. This is comparable to an Ethernet connection, which transmits information between computers at speeds of 10 million to 100 million bits per second."
...I can use my guinea pig as a router?
Terminal porn velocity.
I am quite certain members of slashdot are currently undertaking to break this new barrier as we speak.
Just watch out for the sonic boom when you accomplish your goal.
liqbase
what do security questions have to do with the article mentioned?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
"This is comparable to an Ethernet connection, which transmits information between computers at speeds of 10 million to 100 million bits per second."
You forgot to add...in a perfect world. Does the visual system suffer similiar problems?
This is comparable to an Ethernet connection, which transmits information between computers at speeds of 10 million to 100 million bits per second.
Yes, but we have better encoding.
I am not sure that thinking of signals from the eye to the brain work the same way as computer networks is very helpful. I don't think that there is the same sort of contention in a nervous system as there is in ethernet. Synapses as we understand them today do not appear to have any sort of collision detection. Neurons may have tens of thousands of other neurons that they are connected to in a many-to-one configuration and the whole process is analog, which is very different than ethernet frames. Also a single ganglion cell may send "10 million bits" of information, but the optic nerve is made of many such cells in parallel. I would not be surprised if our current estimates are wrong by at least an order of magnitude.
That's all. Just had to say it. Nothing else to see here.
anthemaniac writes:
The amount of time you transmit data over a network depends on round trip time and bandwidth product, which determines TCP window size that optimizes the send/ack of data packets. You also need to take collision into account.
The ganglion cells are probably more analogous to link transmitter. The measurement is on the amount of information generated by these cells per second. The proper conclusion is that you could probably use ethernet to connect the eyes and your brain, and the required bandwidth is supported.
I once had a signature.
It's the article above this one. Someone just got back from the bar methinks ;)
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
but, my eyes aren't encoding with divx ;)
So, if what I see is roughly the same throughput as ethernet.
Maybe I should rub my eye against a cat 5 cable connected to a computer!
You don't need collision detection if the connection is end-to-end and one way. The reason why wired and wireless ethernet have collision detection is because multiple interfaces are accessing the same channel. If you have multiple eyes on the same optical nerve, you would need collision detection.
I once had a signature.
I was wondering what that RJ45 socket on my head was for. My kids will probably be wireless.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Arr! they only get 10/half
You can *try* but the ping times are terrible.
Maybe you have to give them an exercise wheel?
The OP doesn't say that a single retinal cell transmits 10 million bits a second, but that the whole eye does. On top of that, while discussion of collition detection is pointless, thinking about the information a neuronal population can encode does have some merits. Although it's relatively pointless (at least now) to compare the eye to an ethernet, it has uses in comparing different neural populations.
The problem is that getting bitrates for neuronal populations is more of an art that a science. The sum total of information passed on by a neuron can not be computed simpley by it's spiking rate. Large numbers of parameters alter the actual chemical I/O relationship of a neuron. Resting membrane potential before spiking, whether it shows short term facilitation/depression etc...
-BilZ0r www.ilikethings.net
Did anyone else read "100,000 gajillion cells"?
Senator Ted Stevens already clearly told us about the Internet: "It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes."
My eithernet is the same speed as my eyes. My eyes can see my eithernet. My Eyes can see a duck. Therefor, if my eithernet weighs the same as a duck, its a witch!
it looks like it's running slow.
Google doesn't seem to have this conversion (yet).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
These eyes run Gigabit...What now
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
When the answer to this has been posted, please convert the metric equivalent for our European Friends.
How much is a ganglion?
So what layer do guinea pig eye-sockets reside on the osi model? layer1?
This is comparable to an Ethernet connection, which transmits information between computers at speeds of 10 million to 100 million bits per second.
Guess the author hasn't heard of gigabit ethernet yet. (Been living under a rock? It has been around since 1998)...
My eyes were transmitting 10 mbps until I started reading this, at which point they glazed over and were closer to 56 kbps.
One obviously forgets about spirituality. Science has made some steps to set limits to where about "the spirit" is within the body, and they don't believe it is just the brain anymore with the newer theories of quantum physics. There is the duality with quantum particle that appear to exists in two physical locations at once, but are still considered as one object. Quantum theorists have also suggested that "the spirit" actually is like that in which a part is in every cell like a node. On that note, the brain is just a computer and not thought of as sentient. I won't go into much details about those theories, but that would mean a single cell is able to transmit a much greater amount of information to "the spirit," for example, by quantum nodes than just to the brain.
So, a person with cataracts is like a dialup connection?
Oh great, now AT&T is going to charge me more to see certain things than others. Stupid eye neutrality.
(let's see how many pick up on the joke here...)
...and all this time I've visualized a series of tubes.
The article also doesn't mention the other crucial time factor, beyond transmission speed: the lag between unconscious perception (when the signal from the eye has reached the brain) and conscious perception (when you are aware that you see something). This lag of roughly half a second was first measured in the 1970s by psychologist Benjamin Libet. We don't sense any lag, though, because we automatically antedate the experience of our sensory inputs, pushing it all a half-second into the past, and thus experiencing everything as "now" even though we are actually a half-second behind. A good book about all this is The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders.
This could have something to do with the deja vu experience: something goes wrong in the brain, and we somehow sense that half-second lag in a way we normally don't. In other words, you did "see that before," but the "before" was only half a second ago!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Here's how I look at it... the human eye has a "resolution" far greater than that which any monitor supports, and certainly greater than any streaming video I have ever seen.
Add to that the color depth of the human eye. Granted, not 16 M colors, but still pretty high.
The frame rate of the average human eye is somewhere around 40 fps, I believe. Again, faster than what most streaming videos offer.
Then double all that, 'cause we got two eyes.
I'm pretty sure the "bandwidth" between my eyes and brain is a little faster than even the best ethernet connection.. At least anything that I've seen demonstrated so far.
-David
GPE = Guinea Pig Equivalent
Is ethernet so slow?
I often wish that there was a "-1, Stupid" moderation, but this is the first time I wish it would be applied to one of my comments.
The numbers presented here are very misleading. You get the impression that your eyes are transferring video images as a bunch of pixels at the relatively slow speed of an Ethernet connection. But that's not true. Video processing starts right there in the retina and steadily changes the data from pixel-like date to edges, lines, shape to recognised objects to high level concepts that are conveniently tagged with memories, emotions and other relevent data.
At what point are we measuring the data? If the data that's actually being measured is something like "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" - then having 10 Mbits/sec is a heck of a lot of data. If it's raw video - then it's pathetically little.
We can estimate the bandwidth your eyes could theoretically produce if they were transmitting "raw video". We know that the retina has a resolution of around 5k x 5k "pixels" and we can see motion at around 60Hz and we have more dynamic range than we can display with 12 pixels each for Red, Green and Blue. So at the 'most raw', two eyes would require 5k x 5k x 60Hz x 2 x 12 x 3 bits per second. That's 108 Gbits/sec - which is vastly more than the 10Mbits to 100Mbits this article suggests. You can argue about the details of the numbers I used here - but we're looking at four orders of magnitude - so I have to be a LOT wrong!
So it's pretty certain that what they are measuring in TFA is some kind of condensed or summarized version of the visual data.
That being the case, it's pretty silly to be comparing "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" to a 640x480 JPEG file. It's simply not an 'apples and apples' comparison.
www.sjbaker.org
... that my brain is made up of a series of tubes!
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
is one ganglion?
So that's how they get those digital eyes in GITS (Kokaku Kidotai)
Clearly we're not even comparing apples and oranges here, we're comparing apples and pianos. But it is amusing nonetheless.
Reminds me of a few years back when Apple advertised their latest computers as being "Faster than light". This tagline was withdrawn a few weeks later under attack from the nerd community, but not before some mac fanboys created the amusing argument that the computer completes a floating point calculation in less time than it takes the light from the monitor to reach your eyes. By that (flawed in several ways) logic, the bottleneck in computation is in the display!
Two things you're missing. Fovea and spectral response(1).
(1) If memory serves the eyes use the ratios between the colors, not actual magnitudes.
Yup the ganglion cells would be like the transmitter but if you are generating and transmitting the data then it pretty much needs to flow over some sort of connection(s) to the brain, right? The aggregate speed of the connection(s) is being compared to that of ethernet. What's wrong with that?
From the article: And I though gig to the desktop was all the rage these days...
I've got gigabit ethernet on my computer, so I'm obviously going to have to upgrade to gigabit retinal nerves. Do they sell those on NewEgg?
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
They failed to mention, that a computer sees a one inch red square as about 158,544 Bits where as the human mind sees it as just one small red square.....
God, I hate to feed trolls, particularly racist scum trolls, but if you ever bothered to crack a book or do any research on Google for 15 seconds instead of listening to the drivel spewed by metzger and his nazi/aryan nation buddies, you'd know that the vast majority of welfare recipients and food stamp recipients are white, you fucking ignorant cracker shitbag.
And BTW, I'm white. However, unlike you, I have more than two firing synapses.
(PS: no, I didn't forget the rules of capitalization. Capitalizing metzger and/or nazi and/or aryan nation implies a respect they'll never deserve.)
Computers and the biologically world handle data differently. Computers use digital data. Humans perceive the world in an analog fashion. So we can view a picture at roughly the same speed as you can transfer it across a network. Now change that to text, and I'll bet your calculations are way off; ethernet will transmit text many times faster than the human eye can read it. There's no point to figuring out how many "bits" the human eye can read in a second, because the human eye doesn't read bits. This is just like measuring the size of the internet in terms of Libraries of Congress.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Who cares about the transfer speed. What I want to know is what kind of ping I'm getting.
/dev/random
Don't forget 10-gig ethernet.
But the point of the article was to provide a way to visualize the (native, uncompressed) bandwidth of the eye, not to draw any comparisons between cutting edge technology and the human eye. Most desktop users are familiar with 10/100 ethernet rather than with gig and 10-gig ethernet, so 10/100 forms a better basis of comparison.
How long before I can upgrade my internet tubes to guinea pigs?
And i was looking forward to getting a gigabit interface installed in my skull once cyberjacks became available too :p
Here we have a forum for discussing the news, we've got a generally good thing going here, with interesting comments and articles (some duplicated, but so what? we discuss the dupes anyway, and sometimes there's new information to be vetted.) and even some heated flamewars, which are still respectable as the participants are generally genuinely passionate about their positions.
Why, after we've bothered to create this 'community' does someone feel the need to crap all over it like this? What possesses people to notice something nice others have done and think, "I must destroy this?"
Why even say, "I hope i'm not offending anyone" in the same breath that offends pretty much everyone?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Pr0n is downloaded twice as much as previously calculated.
---southpaw
...as I've never known an Ethernet network to suffer longer "ping" round-trips and increased packet loss as a result of too much beer...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
With the new ettercap eyesniff plugin i see what you see.
ps
stop looking at that.
Yes, but this is how many LoCpf (Library of Congress per fortnight)?
The cluster, not the corporation necessarily. Although that would be an interesting question too.
A bit in computer science has a well defined meaning - a binary digit with a value of 1 or 0. What's a "bit" of information in the brain? I don't think we store data digitally...
rooooar
Did any one else read "100,000 ganglion" as "100,000 gajillion" as in THE LARGEST NUMBER EVER CREATED BY MAN?
.. uh .. my brain's ethernet wasn't fast enough to stop me from making a stuipd comment! Where's my firewall!
I mean
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Ever tried pouring beer over your router/server/computer/etc ?
And that experiment might be even more fun and exciting when all our routers and ethernet networks are replaced with guinea pigs!
Makes me wonder when there will be a new KDE network app coming out called Kuinea Pig or something...
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Putting a transfer rate on the eye brain interlink seems tenuous at best. Our brains don't transfer "bits", they use a compression technology that is more about conceptual patterns and less about adjacent colors, and I'm fairly certain (at least in my case) that our brains lose more information than the average internet link. But, why make the comparison, is it just to continue a long line of "we're just computers".
We're not, we're much more complex, but this isn't going to stop the likes of "futurists" like Kurzweil from writing a riiculous treatise on how we're not using the full "bandwidth" of our "brain interface". Maybe some neo-futurist therapists will adopt this study to claim that our feelings can be understood by applying network troubleshooting technologies to our minds. Never? Stranger things have been done, look up the book "Quantum Mind".
Me? Yuck, ethernet is for connecting computers, it shouldn't be compared to the eye brain interface.
------ Tim O'Brien
Nonsense, off Corrs ---- the amount of bits of information is completely irrelevant in this comparison - it's like comparing kilograms and pounds in one to one scale; the Reason is that to see that Wonderful World around, those pigs visual systems have to process those bits of *information* over multiple layers of neural networks, some of them recursive, then it goes into the mind and...over the hills and far far away we have our Real World. Knowledge aboot it's existance and properties. The gig. The feeling. The vibe, man...Don't even talk aboot awareness! Information is NOT knowledge is NOT awareness! Go, support Erowid.org, you will get a marvelous looking black-yellow mug that shows you that relation by image so you don't forget hwhen you wake up from another shamanic vision. The information word is BIG, the knowledge is less BIG, the awareness is the smallest of them all. Besides that the mug contain ingenious pattern of words that let you easily divine what will happen to you today if you don't take those pills the doctor did not order at all. And you will do something for the People of the Earth, man...Don't let raw numbers deceive you! Never! Think, damn it! I can do it even on 50mg of 2c-i, 4mg of alprazolam and dihydricoxid. You can do it! Don't vote for the *person* again, OK? You must admit you can't count. I can't count! That's why I write software to do it for me. The *person* would like you to memorize the multiplication table, hwhen you can easily reproduce it out of few basic axioms in no time (replace the table with something a bit harder with a name after some very important, dead person. Implemented already in libraries. Really, why *do* you study CS? ;-}}} .A. {{{-: { [We, girls of MIT (whateverwhenever your snobbish CS institution ;-} ist named) know it, now you need to catch up and *fast*] or else...}
I would like to meet you
I've had a similar problem; I previewed my text and the text was previewed IN THE WRONG article; while I did click and reply on the right article. Could it be something to do with that test of the University of Michigan? (which by the way also slows down Firefox on a Powerbook drastically when opening more than 3 articles at a time resulting often with a spinning beachball of dead) ..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
To get a better idea of what the eye really "sees", you need to look at what it would take to generate a realistic video replacement, like IMAX.
IMAX resolution is ~ 10,000 x 7,000 x 24 bit color @ 24 fps = 40,320,000,000 = 40 gigabit/sec
And even IMAX resolution is far from what reality, perhaps by as much as a factor of 10. So while the eye may not see at a rate of 40 gigabit/sec, the brain can "see" and process at that rate.
How can something be redundant, when it doesn't duplicate anything? Good work there, mods.
Pass me some of whatever you're smoking, guy.
EYE was of the impression that it would have been funny, but EYE see interesting as an enlEYEtening and eyepropriate substitute....
(man, slash's word generator is too funny: image word: "knifed".. I'm thinking corrective surgery now... considering this topic...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Chemical synapses are incredibly slower than electrical signals. Our technology still sucks.
Someone didn't have their coffee yet today, did they?