Description of a person whose cerebral cortex is running at a low clock speed.

It would be rude to apply this term to someone whose I/O bandwidth is low due to blindness, deafness, or disturbance to the sensorium.

Umberto Eco gives a splendid example:

I may be slow on the uptake, but I just can't believe that someone can take thirty pages to describe how you toss and turn in bed before falling asleep.

He attributes this to a M. Humblot, reader for the publishing house of Ollendorf, regarding the manuscript of A la Recherche du temps perdu by Proust.

The quote is in lecture 3 of The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1993, published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994, ISBN 0-674-81050-3 and -81051-1.

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