2022.01.27 – 0392 - How Fast Can We Speak… and Listen?
How Fast Can We Speak?
“In just 600 milliseconds, the human brain can think of a word, apply the rules of grammar to it and send it to the mouth to be spoken.”
How Fast can We Listen?
The average rate of speech for an American is about 125 words per minute; the human brain can process about twice that speed (“the average adult can readily comprehend spoken audio at 2X speed or at a compression rate of 50%. This roughly corresponds to 275 words per minute” ) or even more (“people speak out loud at an average of 150 words per minute, while our brains internally yammer along at 400 words per minute”)
So given that humans can process spoken dialogue nearly twice as fast as humans can speak it, listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed makes sense.
A problem seems to be training our brain to recognise unfamiliar speech patterns: “word recognition drops about 40% when audio is played back twice as fast” says Uri Hasson a Princeton neuroscientist.
And listening fast can also reduce the effort that went into producing the podcast: although I listen some roundtable and interview podcasts at 2x, I wouldn’t do the same to the great 20k Hertz podcast because of its production values which’d be lost to me if I listen at speed.
If you ‘listen fast’ you have heard the podcast, but have you ‘felt’ it? You’ve consumed it, but have you comprehended it?