Wandering Minds

"People speak at 100 to 175 words per minute (WPM), but they can listen intelligently at 600 to 800 words per minute. " -- from Mindtools.com http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm

 

The key phrase here is "listen intelligently."

 

I can talk very fast, and I will speed up even more when I get enthused about the topic (which always happens since what I am talking about I am already enthused about).

 

This makes it VERY hard for anyone who is listening to a person who is talking very slowly not interrupt them and finish their thought - you are in a wait state 7 seconds out of 8 seconds while they are talking and you can "race ahead" and finish their thought for them one they have spoken enough words. Sentences (in any language) have a pattern and once you get enough words you can predict with 98% accuracy what the the rest of the words have to be. It is like cracking any code - get enough of it and you can reverse engineer it and figure out the base encryption key. (read "Between Silk and Cyanide" ISBN 0-684-86422-3 by Leo Marks to understand how this is done.) . When people are speaking the "key" is their base idea.

 

I think this is why public speaking is so hard for many people at later ages. When they were young they thought and talked slowly therefore people got impatient with them and stopped talking with them thus made them NOT want to speak based on this social feedback given to them from 6 years of age onwards.

 

Listening to talk radio is a very good way to tell the good speakers from the bad - the good ones are (generally) the hosts and you can figure out how good the callers are by how fast they talk and how precisely they verbalize their thoughts compared to the vast majority of others.

 

Locally in Portland talk radio Lars Larson (www.KXL.com), Victoria Taft (www.KPAM.com), Jayne Carroll (www.kuik.com), & Tom Hartman (www.KPOJ.com) all are very good speakers - I bet most people do not how how fast the hosts are really talking and how fast they are listening.

 

It would be interesting to document the stats of the talking speed of the above set of people.