You don't always know what you're saying

http://www.nature.com/news/you-don-t-always-know-what-you-re-saying-1.15136

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

33 10 12 years ago

Pyrodogg• 12 years ago

A really funny related affect is had using the SpeechJammer app, or similar. It plays back a slightly delayed feed of your voice. Other than the delay it's not altering the speech. If you get the timing right it's almost impossible to talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjWzQEBGCMo

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icechen1.s...

skierscott2• 12 years ago

I feel like the title is overstated. These researchers showed that feedback wasn't important in one small experiment. The title seems to imply something much broader.

For example, when I'm talking about a deeply technical subject I'm well versed in, I use the correct vocal and syntax to express my ideas: I know what I'm saying. When I'm doing a small quick exercise like shown, I might say something inadvertently.

ColinWright2• 12 years ago

  > When I'm doing a small quick exercise like
  > shown, I might say something inadvertently.

So that would mean you don't always know what you're saying, just as the title explicitly says. If the title was:

    You never know what you're saying.

... then it would be wrong. As it is your comment seems to say that it's right.

What have I missed?

skierscott2• 12 years ago

you don't always know what you're saying
You never know what you're saying.

(emphasis added)

There we go. You clarified why I felt this was off -- it's making a global statement. There's almost always a condition that goes with a scientific (or even mathematical) finding. Nature overstated their results.

LordHumungous• 12 years ago

I rarely do in fact.

laxatives• 12 years ago

I'd guess this is especially true if you're drunk or speaking in front of a large audience.

softatlas• 12 years ago

"Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast, and one pricks up one's ears, and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears for instance the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall."

I repeated this to myself, out loud, 100 times. The goal was to simultaneously maintain another persistent stream of thought as I recited, religiously.

The next day I converted my left control key to Backspace, months after asking myself in earnest the question of what I should do with my left control key now that I had already delegated that role to my caps lock. Days later I learned that a co-worker has worked on a keyboard missing its Backspace for years now.

As a practicing psychonaut one must, in order to ascend the order of skills, learn to master speech in a way that is disorderly from other cognitive functions. But first, what is speech must be recognized.

I think with keyboards, we experience much of them same thing: where Backspace becomes a word or a character of one's textual lexicon. It's just a matter of where you put it (let's say, "in your mind"). It's like the paralanguage of "uhms" and "wells" which litter everyday academic to grocery language, cheerily grows in programmers' circles, and then those pauses to reset the conversation of their weed like proliferation.

We do not always know what we are saying because most of the time the meanings are quantifiably outside of the grammar with which our brains have adapted for the purposes of internally efficient speech. Each of us constructs an idiolect for our use, and the semantic edifice wrapping our words which we use to exercise thought often bears signs of the issues we have dealt with, not necessarily in learning the language, but also building it for our individual purposes. Sometimes the constructs we internally put together are resistant to forms of complexity that are outside of the cowpaths we have paved for ourselves.

Lost_BiomedE• 12 years ago

Very true, you are very aware how we think. But I am hesitant to say it since I may be encouraging your behavior, depending on how it is manifested. Be careful, because as you look in, the abyss stares into you. So depending on how you see your behavior, you may want to discourage thinking in this manner.

lplplplplp• 12 years ago

Please write more and publish it.

You don't always know what you're saying

Related Stories