Human Speech: The bottleneck of Modern Human Evolution

I know, I know before you say anything, social life is the core of everything. But that's not what I'm here for.

Think about it for a second, you know for a fact that your mind is much faster than your speech, ie: you think of a sentence in less than a second, you spend more than 2x of that actually saying it.

Let's take a typical Human English conversation (between Alice and Bob):

Alice: Hey Bob, good morning, how are you today? 3 sec
Bob: Hey Alice! I'm fine thank you, how about yourself? 4.5 sec
Alice: I'm great! Have you seen the weather today? It's terrible. 5 sec
Bob: Yeah, this Winter is really getting on my nerves. How was your weekend? 5.5 sec
Alice: It was boring, we stayed at home since little John was sick. What about yours? 6.5 sec
Bob: Oh what a pity. We went to the movies to see the new Spiderman movie. 5.5 sec
Alice: Oh I heard it's great, I want to see it next week with the kids. 4.5 sec
Bob: You definitely should. Alright I will see you soon, Alice! 4 sec
Alice: See you soon, Bob! 2 sec
Total: 40.5 sec, accounting for breathing space, would be ~43 seconds

I used Google Translate Speech to calculate the timings, and this is just for the English language and depending on how fast a person talks. But keep in mind that differences in language speech speed doesn't necessarily mean that some languages are faster than others.

Photo by Arthur Miranda / Unsplash

So what's the deal here?

I believe this example of ~45 seconds of just a small trivial conversation is what makes us slower, also bear in mind some language barriers and lost-in-translation kind of conversations.

Imagine for a second that your speech is as fast as your brain, that you can digitally send ideas to the other person, regardless of what language they spoke. How many hours would you save per day?

Imagine reading an entire book by digitally downloading it to your brain with a click of a button, saving you -probably an entire month- of time!

What about social life?

People would still be having conversations, just faster. Imagine that people would kind of "pair" initially, and then after the connection has been established, they can freely think what's on their mind to the other person, having conversations in a blitz of a second.

Still, people would disagree and believe this is turning us more inhumane than we already are (with smartphones in our hands all the time). I would disagree with that theory as well, maybe not for every day conversations, but maybe for knowledge sharing or learning (the book example).

Seeing where technology is going right now, I believe this is very plausible in the near future.