Illano comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Coscott 25 February 2014 04:57AM

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Comment author: Illano 28 February 2014 03:40:44PM 2 points [-]

As a baseline estimate for just the muscular system, the worlds faster drummer can play at about 20 beats per second. That's probably an upper limit on twitch speeds of human muscles, even with a arbitrarily fast mind running in the body. Assuming you had a system on the receiving end that could detect arbitrary muscle contractions, and could control each muscle in your body independently (again, this is an arbitrarily fast mind, so I'd think it should be able to), there are about 650 muscle groups in the body according to wikipedia, so I would say a good estimate for just the muscular system would be 650 x 20bits/s or about 13 Kb/s.

Once you get into things like EKGs, I think it all depends on how much control the mind actually has over processes that are largely subconscious, as well as how sensitive your receiving devices are. That could make the bandwidth much higher, but I don't know a good way to estimate that.

Comment author: 4hodmt 01 March 2014 10:28:31AM 0 points [-]

20 beats per second is for two-handed drumming over one minute, so that's only 10bits/s/muscle theoretical maximum. There doesn't seem to be any organized competition for one-handed drumming, but Takahashi Meijin was famous for button mashing at 16 presses per second with only one hand, although for much shorter times.