Why does hearing yourself speak with a few seconds of delay, completely crash your brain?
In: Other
No idea why it would. Mine keeps on working when this sort of thing happens. I think you meant to ask why it sounds weird, or feels weird?
It requires focus. Just keep thinking about the end of the sentence and it will just come out.
Source: been in some nice flight simulators.
I don’t know, but I once had it happen to my internal thoughts after eating a suspicious gummy. You think it’s hard when you’re hearing yourself? Try having your thoughts echo back in your mind at just the right delay to make it impossible to think.
I’m not claiming to know, just a random guess. To me, it feels less like it being specifically my own voice. And more just that my brain automatically assumes I’m talking over someone and wants to stop to let them finish. Without the delay, you’re just hearing yourself talk as normal.
I’m not an expert on this, but here’s what I’ve heard. When you speak, your brain is simultaneously listening and checking your speech for accuracy. Making adjustments and error corrections as necessary. This happens pretty fast, basically at the same time you’re speaking. (Sine your brain already knows what it’s going to say beforehand it sort of has a transcript of your words before you even speak.) This process is mostly automatic and unconscious. I can only assume that hearing your voice a second time or at a different time than your brain is expecting interferes with this error correction process. By the time you hear yourself, you’ve moved on to another word, and your brain is hearing the “wrong” thing. If any neurologists are here feel free to correct me. Lol
[removed]
Brain tells Mouth to say “Apple”
Ears check that Mouth said Apple correctly. They hear “Apple” because it came out of your mouth, so they tell Brain everything is ok.
Brain tells Mouth to say “Tree”
Ears check that Mouth said Tree correctly. They hear both Tree and Apple because Tree came from your mouth, but Apple came from the slightly delayed speakers behind you. Ears tell Brain you messed up because they heard something that kind of sounded like Tree, but wasn’t quite right.
Brain tries to verify that you did in fact say Tree and it successfully does so, but that sure was confusing and a lot more effort than normal conversation.
If this happens for a whole sentence, your brain runs out of processing power and freezes like a computer.
Most of us are taught not to speak when someone else is speaking. It’s usually an awkward form of confrontation if two people are speaking simultaneously at the same volume and saying different things.
When your own voice gets played back at you, it’s like someone else is talking at the same time. Most people will not be able to properly focus on their own thoughts in such a situation.
Speech jamming is actually best done with about 200ms of delay in adults. Shorter times are more likely to be processed as echo and discarded, longer times (like a few seconds) don’t match up closely enough to trigger the reflex that subconsciously monitors your speech and compensates for/corrects errors without you thinking about it. 200ms is long enough so that the sound at your ear is different than at your mouth, and so the brain processes that as an error.
Pro tip: if you’re working an event and a rowdy guest crashes the party and takes the mic unwanted, throw 200ms onto that feed.
Wait, this isn’t just me?!?!
It happened to me once when I was on a phone call, and the feedback just completely threw me. My speech slowed down as a result and I was slurring my words like a drunk. It felt so weird.
Latest Answers