Conversation isn’t just vital to individuals, but to societies as well Gary Burchell/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Talking Heads
Shane O’Mara (Bodley Head)
HUMAN conversation is highly structured, and those structures are often consistent across languages. In face-to-face conversation, we tend to take turns speaking for about 2 seconds, with a gap of about one-fifth of a second between exchanges. This gap is so short that it is comparable to the response time to a starting pistol, and it is only possible because we anticipate what people are going to say based on just their first few words.
Indeed, our use…
