Rethinking How We Think
What does it really mean to have a quantum computer between our ears?
Quantum information is exchanged on the order of nanoseconds (that’s 10^-9, or a billionth of a second). Assuming our subconscious brains process information as a quantum computer (granted, an assumption that’s not fully accepted yet), they would be churning through
every 1 second, the amount of information it would take us 30 years to actively process.
Our conscious mind works on the order of seconds, while our subconscious mind works on the order of nanoseconds — a billion times faster.
What does this tell us about subconscious biases?
Biases come from everywhere — the stereotypes we see in entertainment, the framing and agenda-setting of news organizations, the choice of first-person perspective in our history textbooks. And it turns out that these biases and predispositions are much more significant than we realize. No matter how much we train our conscious brain to “overcome racism,” we’ll never truly improve until we remove the source of the problem from…
