The astoundingly short gap between spoken turns
My friend Kasia last year tweeted an article about a (rarely thought-about) phenomenon that is typical of conversations between humans: the astoundingly short gap between spoken turns. This gap is usually just 200 milliseconds in duration (although there are slight variations across different cultures). 200 milliseconds is, for example, the time that runners take to respond to a starting pistol. So it indeed is not very long! Read the article here.
It means that when we’re engaged in a conversation, we are pressed for time (which never is a nice state to be in). We are forced to think about and form our responses while we’re still listening to what the other person is saying, to be able to reply at the earliest possible opportunity. It’s a culturally imposed conversation pattern: we minimise the gap of silence between turns in a conversation because it’s expected of us.
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| A culturally imposed phenomenon: when we’re engaged in a conversation, we're pressed for time (Image source: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay) |
The lasting effect of childhood experiences
The article reminded me of how as a child I was once mocked (first by a stranger, then by a relative) for not replying quickly enough. It wasn't the first time it was suggested to me something was wrong with me in that respect. In some odd way, certain experiences from our childhoods tend to have a lasting effect on us, although the human mind is also good at simply shoving such memories away. But the memory of being mocked for not replying quickly enough stuck with me subconsciously: I henceforth believed conversations were supposed to be a quick exchange of spoken turns.
As children we tend to believe what the grown-ups tell us; as grown-ups we’re free to think our own thoughts. As a grown-up, I now think it should really be the other way around: conversations should not be of a rapid-fire nature, but ideally should be deep, perhaps even slow. And pauses for thinking, by all means, should be allowed.
The benefits of pauses in conversation
Pauses for thinking may be necessary for various reasons: so that we don’t offend the other person; so that we’re able to come up with something better than the usual platitudes that mark a lot of our conversations; so that we can give our full, undivided attention to what the other person is saying.
What does it take to have a really good conversation? To take one step in the right direction, let’s prolong what Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the article terms “the minimum human response time” at least a bit. Time in our day and age is a luxury and should be employed wisely, not least in conversations!
