A Sunday Story
I was having coffee with my friend last week. He teaches at Berkeley and talks really fast. We were discussing something—I can’t even remember what—and I made a joke. “I’m glad I can listen faster than you’re talking.”
He laughed. Said something about “listening speed” being a thing.
That got me curious. How fast DO we listen? How fast do we think? How fast can we actually talk? I went looking. What I found changed how I understand something I’ve been dealing with my entire life.
The Bedroom in Reseda
I must have been seven, maybe eight. We lived in Reseda, and I’d wake up early most mornings but wouldn’t get out of bed right away. I’d just lie there.
My mom walked in one morning. “What are you doing?”
“I’m figuring out what everybody is going to say to me today and what I’m going to say back.”
She looked at me for a second, then she left.
I did this every morning. Pre-scripting conversations before they happened. Running scenarios. Preparing responses. Even at seven, I was trying to get ahead of something I couldn’t name.
The Research
So last week, after the Berkeley friend comment, I started digging into the numbers. Average speaking speed: 125-150 words per minute. Average listening speed: 150-160 words per minute, though we can comprehend up to around 210 WPM if we speed up audio.
Then I found the interesting number: thinking speed, 1,000-3,000 words per minute.
That stopped me. Ten to twenty times faster than speaking. That’s not a gap. That’s a canyon.
But how do they even measure that? Turns out there’s a 1990 study by Rodney Korba where he had people solve problems mentally while measuring their laryngeal muscle activity—their inner voice muscles moving. Then he asked them to expand their compressed thoughts into full sentences.
The math: what took 10 seconds of inner speech translated to a minute or more when fully articulated. The 1,000-3,000 WPM figure isn’t how fast you’re thinking—it’s how fast your thinking WOULD be if you said it all out loud.
Your brain compresses everything. “Coffee... meeting... forgot” instead of “I forgot about the meeting because I was getting coffee.” But here’s what got me: that compression only works for YOU. The second you need to communicate to someone else, you have to expand it back out, and that expansion has to squeeze through a 150 WPM bottleneck.
The Mom Story
My mom used to tell me: “If you don’t stop talking, your brother will never learn how to talk.”
I’ve been using that joke for years. It’s funny. It’s self-deprecating. It lets me acknowledge something everyone knows about me without making it awkward. But it’s not really a joke, is it? I DO talk too much and always have.
I remember writing about this a few weeks ago. The CIA teaches intelligence officers two questions before they speak: WAIT (Why Am I Talking?) and WAIST (Why Am I Still Talking?). I need those questions tattooed somewhere visible.
Last year, playing pickleball, our coach would call us to the net and just... talk. Technique, strategy, positioning, what we did wrong, what we should do next time. Then he’d just turn around and walk back to the baseline without waiting for questions or checking if we understood. We started saying “Good Talk, Coach” every time. He was exhaling only, just pure output.
My friend John Grower has a term for this: “exhale only.” You’re not listening. You’re just talking.
I do that. I know I do that. People have told me my whole life. “That’s enough, Mark.” “Let someone else talk.” “Read the room.” And here’s the thing: they’re not wrong.
The Discovery
Four weeks ago, I started using Whispr Flow. It’s speech-to-text—hold a key, talk, it types. That’s it.
I can type fast. Took typing in summer school when I was 13, 14, 15. Don’t look at the keyboard. Don’t think about it. But Whispr changed something fundamental. I don’t have to START typing or switch mental modes. I just hold the key and talk.
My facility to get stuff out of my brain doubled, maybe tripled. I started using it everywhere—writing notes, drafting emails, working through ideas. Then I realized: I’m not just faster. I’m accessing something different.
When I type, even fast typing, I’m translating thought into written language. There’s a conversion step. When I speak into Whispr, I’m just thinking out loud. The thoughts come out AS thoughts, not as translations of thoughts. That’s when I went looking for the research.
The Bottleneck
The neuroscience gets complicated, but here’s what matters: Your brain processes in parallel with multiple streams running at once—images, feelings, connections, half-formed ideas, all happening simultaneously. Speech is serial. One word. One syllable. One phoneme. Then the next. Then the next.
The brain has to select from parallel streams, serialize the information, translate compressed inner speech into expanded outer speech, and execute motor commands to your mouth. Each step adds delay. The bottleneck isn’t in your mouth—it’s in the architecture. You literally CAN’T speak as fast as you think. It’s not possible.
But here’s what hit me: some people experience that gap as WAITING. They think something, pause, then speak. I experience it as URGENCY. The thoughts keep coming. The 150 WPM output can’t keep up with the 1,000-3,000 WPM input. So I keep talking, trying to catch up with myself.
That pre-scripting I did as a kid? I was trying to CONTROL the freight train before it left the station.
The Browser With No Close Button
I was talking to a friend recently who has ADHD. He described his mental experience as “having hundreds of tabs open in my head at any given time.”
That stopped me.
Because the freight train phenomenon—thoughts racing faster than speech—exists for everyone. But what if some brains experience it MORE intensely because they can’t close the background tabs?
I went digging again.
Turns out the “tabs open” metaphor isn’t just colorful language. There’s a part of your brain that runs in the background when you’re daydreaming or thinking about yourself. In most brains, this background system switches OFF when you focus on something. You’re having a conversation, so the grocery list thoughts quiet down.
In some brains, that switching mechanism fails. The background system doesn’t go offline. It keeps running. Always. Every thought demanding attention because the brain’s priority system is compromised.
Now add this: many people with ADHD also have smaller working memory capacity. The buffer is smaller. So the tabs aren’t necessarily MORE numerous, but there’s less space to manage them.
This explains something I’ve noticed in conversations with people who process verbally: they’re not retrieving pre-formed thoughts when they talk. They’re GENERATING thoughts. Speech isn’t output—it’s the mechanism by which thinking happens. When your internal buffer can’t hold the queue, talking out loud becomes the scaffolding you need.
It’s why some people NEED to talk to think. Not a personality quirk. A functional adaptation.
The freight train hits those brains harder. Not because they think faster—they don’t. But because the filter doesn’t work (background thoughts won’t quiet), the buffer is too small (working memory can’t hold everything), and the brake doesn’t engage (impulse control is harder).
What most brains experience as a manageable throughput problem becomes an overwhelming flood seeking any exit.
The Improv Problem
I do improvisational comedy and have for years. The first rule of improv: don’t think, react. The best moments on stage happen when I turn off my conscious brain and stop trying to be clever and just respond.
Flow state, they call it. Your prefrontal cortex dials down. The inner critic quiets. Your executive control relaxes. Speech just flows.
But here’s the thing: even in flow state, I’m still hitting that 150 WPM ceiling. The bottleneck doesn’t go away. Flow makes it FEEL effortless, but it doesn’t make it faster. The freight train is still running at 3,000 WPM. I’m just not fighting it anymore.
I’m riding it instead of trying to trap it in a script.
The Social Contract
At 72, I’m still learning how to read the room. I speak professionally. People invite me. People listen. That works. But in conversation? Dinner parties? Casual groups? I still get the look. The “okay, that’s enough” look.
And here’s the hard truth: they’re right.
I’ve spent 72 years being told I talk too much. What changed last week isn’t the behavior—it’s the understanding. The freight train is REAL. The 3,000 WPM processing trying to squeeze through 150 WPM articulation isn’t a metaphor. It’s measurable neuroscience. For some people, that bottleneck is amplified by brains that can’t close background tabs, can’t buffer the queue, can’t engage the brake.
But understanding why doesn’t change what I need to do differently.
This isn’t permission to keep doing what I’ve always done. It’s a MAP. And here’s what you can do with a map that you can’t do without one: you can navigate more intelligently. You can’t change the terrain, but you can stop blaming yourself for the terrain being difficult.
That seven-year-old in Reseda trying to pre-script every conversation? He wasn’t weird. He was trying to control something his brain wasn’t wired to control easily. The 72-year-old who still gets “that’s enough” from friends? He’s not inconsiderate. He’s learning to navigate a freight train with bicycle brakes.
Understanding doesn’t solve it. But it reframes it. “Talking too much” isn’t a character flaw—it’s an architectural challenge.
Maybe you’re a verbal processor. Maybe you think by talking. Maybe your brain really IS running at 3,000 WPM trying to squeeze through a 150 WPM bottleneck. Maybe your background thoughts won’t turn off and your working memory can’t buffer the queue.
Doesn’t matter. You still have to learn where the brake pedal is. You still have to ask: WAIT? WAIST? You still have to give other people air. The architecture explains the urgency. It doesn’t excuse ignoring the social contract.
The map doesn’t change the terrain. But it stops you from blaming yourself for the mountain being there.
Now What?
So what do you do with this?
First, ask yourself a diagnostic question: When you’re talking, are you RETRIEVING thoughts or GENERATING them? Do you experience the gap between thinking and speaking as waiting or as urgency?
The answer tells you which side of the bottleneck you’re on. If you feel urgency, you might be a verbal processor. If you feel waiting, you’re probably not.
Second, reframe the social feedback: Next time someone tells you “that’s enough”—pause. Not because they’re right or wrong about you, but because they’re giving you data.
They’re telling you the freight train left the station without checking if anyone else wanted to board. The brake pedal exists. You just have to find it. WAIT and WAIST aren’t judgments—they’re navigation tools.
Third, examine your tools: If you’re a verbal processor—if speech IS your thinking—what tools are you using? Are you still typing at 40 WPM when your brain runs at 3,000?
The bottleneck isn’t going away. But you can change WHICH bottleneck you’re hitting. Speech-to-text at 150 WPM doesn’t solve the problem, but it gets closer to the source. It accesses a different layer.
The Map
What I DO know: Whispr unlocked something. Not just speed—access. When I talk out loud, I’m not retrieving pre-formed thoughts. I’m GENERATING them. Speech isn’t just output. It’s part of the thinking process itself.
That little kid in Reseda, lying in bed pre-scripting conversations? He’s still here. Still trying to get ahead of the freight train before it leaves the station.
The 72-year-old doing improv? He’s the same kid. Just learned that sometimes the best move is to stop trying to control it and see where it goes.
But here’s what’s different now: I know what I’m working with. Not a personality flaw that needs fixing. Not a bad habit that needs breaking. An architectural reality that needs navigating.
The research gave me something I didn’t have before—a framework that makes sense of 72 years of “Mark, that’s enough.” It doesn’t make those moments hurt less. It doesn’t mean people were wrong to say it. But it means I can stop wondering what’s wrong with me and start asking what works better.
Four weeks with Whispr Flow taught me something the research couldn’t: the tool matters less than understanding why the tool helps. Speech-to-text doesn’t solve the bottleneck. It just gets me closer to where the thoughts actually live.
Maybe that’s what all of this comes down to. Not finding the solution. Finding the right question.
Not “why can’t I stop talking?”
But “what am I trying to say that won’t fit through the opening I’ve got?”
The freight train’s not going anywhere. It’s been running at 3,000 words per minute since I was seven years old.
I’m just finally learning what it’s carrying.
P.S.
After I finished writing this, I learned something that stopped me in my tracks.
Network engineers have a concept called flow control—the process of managing data transmission rates between devices to prevent a fast sender from overwhelming a slow receiver. They use techniques like “stop-and-wait” or “sliding windows” to regulate how much data is sent before an acknowledgment is required, preventing buffer overflow, data loss, and network congestion by ensuring the receiver has time to process incoming packets. It’s a speed-matching mechanism.
Sound familiar? Because that’s not a metaphor for what I’ve been describing. That’s the exact same architectural problem.
Network engineers didn’t solve this by telling the fast sender to “stop being so fast.” They built protocols. They created systems that acknowledge when the receiver is ready. They designed architecture that manages the mismatch. WAIT and WAIST? That’s stop-and-wait protocol. “That’s enough, Mark”? That’s an ACK signal telling me the buffer is full. The freight train and the 150 WPM bottleneck? That’s transmission rate mismatch.
I’ve spent 72 years thinking this was a personal failing. Turns out network engineers have been solving this exact problem since the 1960s. They just call it something different.
This story was produced by the EVERYWHERE™ team. Research by Priya Kumar. Humanization by Byron Chase. Voice DNA by Jordan Lane. Strategic editing by Natasha Cross. Quality assurance by Charlie. Orchestrated by Sara Williams and written by me, Mark Sylvester.
