The Flickering Threat Loop and the Bandwidth of the Brain

Every day your brain predicts what is about to happen. If I asked right now, “Who here is thirsty?” some of you would raise your hands. If I followed with, “Who here needs to go to the bathroom?” more hands would go up. Those quick checks are your brain forecasting needs before they overwhelm you. Once they are met, the prediction fades and you move on. This is how prediction works at the most basic level.

But in relationships and therapy, predictions are not always so simple. Neuroscience shows there is about a 250 millisecond delay between sensation and conscious awareness. During that quarter of a second your nervous system flickers between fast threat detection in the amygdala and slower meaning-making in the prefrontal cortex. I call this the Flickering Threat Loop. It is the gap where the brain decides if something is safe or dangerous, familiar or rejecting, and it explains why people can react before they can explain.

A natural question is whether the brain can run multiple loops at once. The answer is yes, but not without limits. The salience network, which acts like the brain’s task scheduler, constantly decides what is most important. When multiple loops fire simultaneously, like a harsh tone of voice, a sudden movement, and a threatening word, the system cannot process all equally. It prioritizes one, delays others, or folds them together. That is why trauma clients get overwhelmed and shut down, and why ADHD clients often drop or misprioritize cues. The limitation is bandwidth.

This raises a fun thought experiment. What if the brain really did run at full speed? If all 86 billion neurons fired at their maximum 200 Hz, the brain would process about 17 trillion operations per second. On paper that is faster than a supercomputer. In reality the brain would overheat and collapse. It only runs on about 20 watts, the same as a dim light bulb. If everything fired at once the heat would be catastrophic. And even if your skull could handle the energy, you would not get clearer thought, you would get seizures. Synchrony in the cortex is dangerous when it happens without regulation. Instead the brain evolved sparse firing, inhibition, and prediction. That is how it avoids crashing and stays efficient.

The best way to understand this is with a computer analogy. Neurons are slow compared to processors, firing at around 200 Hz while CPUs run in gigahertz. Working memory is tiny, only 4 to 7 chunks at a time, the equivalent of kilobytes of RAM. Long term memory, however, is massive, estimated in the petabyte range, rivaling the internet. Conscious awareness has latency of about 250 ms compared to nanoseconds in machines. These limits force the brain to lean on prediction like a compression algorithm. It fills in the gaps from past patterns instead of recalculating every detail from scratch.

Clinically this has enormous implications. Couples replay loops of rejection because meaning inherited through families is embedded in their predictive core. Trauma floods the system with too many signals at once and bandwidth collapses into fight flight or shutdown. ADHD shows how predictions are dropped or misrouted so a forgotten task is read as rejection or laziness instead of a neurological limitation. And metaphors give clients a shortcut to grasp these ideas without overwhelming their limited RAM. Asking about thirst or the bathroom is not a joke. It is a way to make prediction real in the body.

The Flickering Threat Loop reminds us that the brain’s limitations are also its strength. You cannot overclock your mind like a gaming rig. It was not built for raw speed but for efficiency, connection, and meaning. In therapy this framing gives both clinicians and clients a way to understand why we misfire, why we flood, and how we can learn to predict differently.