3 ms·

Here is an interesting tidbit I learned: the median response time in a human conversation is 0 milliseconds. In other words, more than half the time you begin

Here is an interesting tidbit I learned: the median response time in a human conversation is 0 milliseconds. In other words, more than half the time you begin responding to your conversation partner before they finish speaking. And in most cases you respond nearly instantly after they finish speaking. Anyone who has worked on voice assistants knows that computers take much longer than that to determine that someone has finished speaking. And anyone who has studied brain functions knows that it takes 100's of milliseconds for the brain to process information like spoken words. So basically that just proves that the brain must be predicting what the other person is going to say.

thom 4y ago
I don’t actually disagree, but ‘must’ seems too strong here. It could mean that they’ve already reached a threshold of comprehension earlier in the current speech, or that they’ve latched on to a pertinent point and don’t care to hear the rest.
- spyke112 4y ago
  My wife hates when I do exactly this. It’s extremely hard to change, because it’s so subconcious.
  - thom 4y ago
    I partly blame growing up on IRC for the behaviour - my brain seems to treat all communication as asynchronous. And while I often find myself apologising for the it, I also try and reassure people it's entirely because they said something I found interesting and was responding to it. It is a struggle though!
- jedberg 4y ago
  > It could mean that they’ve already reached a threshold of comprehension earlier in the current speech I feel like that is a distinction without a difference. If they already comprehend, then haven't they basically predicted the rest? > or that they’ve latched on to a pertinent point and don’t care to hear the rest. This I suppose is a little different, in that they are ignoring the rest, so yeah you're right there, it may not be predictive in that case.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
That's how our visual system works as well. The visual cortex is actually providing very little information to our forward predictive models, but the model is giving a lot of information back to the visual cortex.

thom 4y ago

I don’t actually disagree, but ‘must’ seems too strong here. It could mean that they’ve already reached a threshold of comprehension earlier in the current speech, or that they’ve latched on to a pertinent point and don’t care to hear the rest.

spyke112 4y ago
My wife hates when I do exactly this. It’s extremely hard to change, because it’s so subconcious.
- thom 4y ago
  I partly blame growing up on IRC for the behaviour - my brain seems to treat all communication as asynchronous. And while I often find myself apologising for the it, I also try and reassure people it's entirely because they said something I found interesting and was responding to it. It is a struggle though!
jedberg 4y ago
> It could mean that they’ve already reached a threshold of comprehension earlier in the current speech I feel like that is a distinction without a difference. If they already comprehend, then haven't they basically predicted the rest? > or that they’ve latched on to a pertinent point and don’t care to hear the rest. This I suppose is a little different, in that they are ignoring the rest, so yeah you're right there, it may not be predictive in that case.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

That's how our visual system works as well. The visual cortex is actually providing very little information to our forward predictive models, but the model is giving a lot of information back to the visual cortex.