Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

submitted by magnora7 from (sciencemag.org)

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[–]magnora7[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The final sentence struck me:

“It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.”

Also thinking about how low a bitrate 39 bits per second is... it's maybe no wonder most animals haven't developed speech. It's a very subtle information gain.

I wonder how many bits per second come from body language and other non-verbal cues.

Also I wonder if it'd be possible to come up with a cell-phone encryption method that only uses 39 bits per second, if that's actually capable of representing human speech.