Say Less

With active global conflicts, American democracy on the ropes, affordability issues abounding, and that irritating thing where professional tennis players always take 4-5 balls from ballkids before selecting the two they want to serve with and then making the ball kids bend down and pick up the discarded balls, it’s probably going to be difficult to create a meaningful groundswell of concern about this issue: People aren’t talking enough. “An analysis published in July in Perspectives on Psychological Science of more than 2,000 people found that Americans and people in several other countries are speaking roughly 300 fewer words a day, or about two to three minutes’ worth, with each passing year. The drop – a 28 percent decline from 2005 to 2019 – was especially pronounced among people younger than 25.” In this age of idiocy, when the deluge of words we encounter tends to result in symptoms similar to those one might experience after eating a few bags of Taylor Farms shredded lettuce, it’s safe to say that hearing fewer words might not be our most pressing menace. But researchers are concerned that speaking fewer words could have a negative impact. “Producing even an ordinary sentence requires the brain to retrieve words, organize them, coordinate muscles, interpret another person’s response and formulate what comes next – all in a fraction of a second. Regions in our brains, including Broca’s area in the left hemisphere, play important roles in speech production and articulation. That raises a provocative possibility. If conversation repeatedly recruits these systems, could talking itself function as a modest form of cognitive exercise? And if so, what happens when people do less of it?” WaPo (Gift Article): The ‘Gen Z stare’ — and the decline of saying things out loud. (I asked both of my Gen Z kids what they thought of this theory, and neither one answered. I’ll keep asking the question. I need the exercise.)