Everyone talks about "chain-of-thought" in LLMs but nobody actually measured when thoughts emerge in humans. So I sat with a stopwatch, tried to keep my mind blank, pressed lap every time a thought broke through. 100 data points. Mean latency: 11.77 seconds, which lines up almost exactly with Default Mode Network oscillations from fMRI studies. The interesting part: once a thought breaks through, 54% chance the next one comes faster. They cascade. Distribution is bimodal (modes at ~5s and ~25s), two distinct processes. Full dataset with millisecond precision in the paper. Not claiming this solves AGI, just actual data on something we keep hand-waving about.
Everyone talks about "chain-of-thought" in LLMs but nobody actually measured when thoughts emerge in humans. So I sat with a stopwatch, tried to keep my mind blank, pressed lap every time a thought broke through. 100 data points. Mean latency: 11.77 seconds, which lines up almost exactly with Default Mode Network oscillations from fMRI studies. The interesting part: once a thought breaks through, 54% chance the next one comes faster. They cascade. Distribution is bimodal (modes at ~5s and ~25s), two distinct processes. Full dataset with millisecond precision in the paper. Not claiming this solves AGI, just actual data on something we keep hand-waving about.