Published on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month

Talking to Learn

Feb 19 2007, Mike Estep

How important is talking to learning? Much more than most people realize.

People are generally taught in school that sound waves travel through the air and vibrate the eardrums. Our brain then interprets this as sound. So, it would make sense to most people that we hear our own voices in this manner when we speak. But there is much more to the story than this.

When we speak, the vocal cords vibrate. This vibration is not stationary. It moves out in all directions. It also travels through the tissues in the human body. If you place your hand on your throat and count out loud “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7”, you will feel the vibration in your hand. Your hand is not directly touching your vocal cords. So, the vibration is traveling through skin, muscle, bone, cartilage, etc.

In the same manner, this vibration travels through the skull and into the brain. The brain literally vibrates when you speak. There are also thousands of vibrating pitches occurring simultaneously. The human audio spectrum alone consists of an approximate range of 20 sound waves per second (very low pitches) to 20,000 sound waves per second (extremely high pitches). When we hear pitches in nature, we are not hearing only single pure pitches (sine waves). In most cases we are hearing multiple thousands of pitches with one pitch being louder than the rest. Our mind perceives the resulting combination as a single pitch. For instance, if a string is plucked on a guitar, there are thousands of pitches being produced simultaneously. One pure pitch (fundamental frequency) is louder than the rest. The other pitches (harmonic frequencies) help to produce the character of the sound which is why we can distinguish it as a guitar. Harmonics make it possible for humans to distinguish all sounds from each other. So when the vocal cords vibrate from speaking, there are literally thousands of pitches being produced simultaneously, which are all vibrating the brain.

The skin and other organs are covered with millions of nerve cells that sense physical vibration. When the vocal cords vibrate, the vibration travels through much of the body. The vibration is stronger closest to the source, so it will be stronger in the throat and weaker further away from the throat. Nevertheless, much of the body is vibrating, which affects all nerve cells in those areas that sense vibration. Therefore, millions of signals are simultaneously being sent through the nerves to the brain when we speak.

So, three very powerful ways of encoding information into the brain take place through speaking and vocal cord vibration...
  • The eardrums vibrate when we hear our own voice through the air
  • The brain vibrates with thousands of frequencies simultaneously
  • Millions of nerves in the body vibrate sending simultaneous signals to the brain
Unfortunately, after about the second to third grade in school, or when we can read words silently, we are put in a position to almost never talk for learning purposes again. It is important to learn how to read silently and to promote order in a classroom setting through silence. However, we have incorrectly been conditioned in believing that there is no importance to continual speaking in a classroom setting. Our schools are generally good at teaching people how to think logically (and silently). On the other hand our schools perform terribly at helping people to retain information past the point of taking a test. Most people may be able to recall about 5 percent of all the information they are exposed to in school off the top of their heads. It is ironic that one of the things we learned the best and stuck with us came about from speaking in class - namely, the multiplication tables. A common scenario consists of a teacher writing out the tables on the board and the class reciting them out loud (2x0=0, 2x1=2, 2x2=4, etc.). It is common for many people to retain much of this information for life.

In my private instruction, I have tested this with hundreds of people where it has been years since they went through this process in school. Many of these people have not attended school in over 40 years. If I ask a question like “What is 5x6?” most people within seconds will answer “30”. Why are people able to retain this type of information even if they have been out of school for decades? I’m convinced that it is because of the way the information was encoded into the brain. There was repetition. But more importantly, they were allowed to speak out loud during the process.

If you truly want to learn something in a way that it becomes part of you, then develop a lifelong habit of speaking out loud to aid in the process.

I’ll close with this thought. Have you ever heard teachers make a statement like “You have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you talk.” If there is any truth to this statement, then the reverse should be true also. We should be allowed to talk half as much as we listen in school.