the speed of thought compared to the speed of light

In Sharon of Two Salem, Book 3, there's a reference to how our perception of time passing by would be greatly slowed down if our thoughts moved at the speed of light (I can't quote the passage here, because it would be a spoiler).

The speed of light is 186,282.397 miles per second. This is going to take a few posts for ME to understand, so bear with me.

From Discover Magazine's website, "The Brain: What Is the Speed of Thought?" is found this information:

"Our nerves operate at many different speeds, reflecting the biological challenges of wiring all the parts of the body together. In some ways evolution has fine-tuned our brains to run like a digital superhighway, but in other ways it has left us with a Pony Express."

From the Wikipedia entry, "Nerve conduction velocity," there are indeed many speeds measured for impulses traveling through various neural pathways; the range is all the way from 0.5 meters per second to 120 m/s. Generally, though, "Largely generalized, normal conduction velocities for any given nerve will be in the range of 50–60 m/s." So for this calculation, we'll use 60 meters per second for the speed of thought. First we convert the speed of light to the metric system, which results in 299,792,458 meters per second. To see how that compares to the speed of transmission in neurons:

299,792,458 m/s (light)                                       X

___________________                          =                 ___________________

            60 m/s (thought)                                         1

...where X will give us how much faster light is than thought. Cross-multiply and divide, and X equals 4,996,541. This basically means that if our thoughts truly did move through our neurons at the speed of light, everything would be slowed down by a factor of almost FIVE MILLION times!

We'd get bored very quickly! More posts on this to follow...