This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of humanbehavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. Incomparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s. The stark contrastbetween these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects ofbrain function: What neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of ourexistence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s?Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate intwo distinct modes: the "outer" brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory andmotor signals, whereas the "inner" brain processes the reduced few bits neededto control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbersin the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new researchdirections to remedy this.