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.