Thought > Speech

Day Four

It was through a feeling of great inconvenience that today's revelations about the nature of language surfaced. Though in the past four weeks since the experiment began I had chosen to practice silence on a Monday or a Tuesday, this week I wavered, knowing that there was a friend I wanted to catch up with and that I had to speak with a professor about an exam. It only took a slight hesitation in commitment in the morning to seal the fate of those Monday and Tuesday days as days of speech. For if I do not begin the practice immediately in the morning when I wake up, framing the day so, I know it will be much more difficult to "shut myself up," and I won't be in the proper receptive state of mind. And I realize this rearrangement of the vow to my whimmed schedule in a sense may compromise some of that which I could find if I were to with strict discipline force the silence upon myself on the same day every week. For it has been in the obstacles that I have learned the most thus far. This is something to be considered for the weeks to come.

And so it fell on a Wednesday this week. I had figured that it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience to remain silent this day because I had a paper to work on. I came to find that I was very much mistaken in this assumption. After not having spoken the entire day, I found writing to be extremely difficult. I was having an abnormally hard time formulating my thoughts coherently, and felt as if my thoughts had been replaced by static airwaves, my brain humming white noise. Even the voices around me in the library began to blend until they no longer consisted of words but strings of fluctuating tones interweaving through the air around me. I began to feel distressed, but upon becoming aware of the phenomenon more curious.

I felt that I "could not think" nor write because I had not been speaking. In very layman terms, in order to have an articulate mind I "needed to get the juices flowing" by talking. I recalled learning about Broca's area in a psychology class, which is the part of the brain responsible for speech production, but not the understanding of language. Perhaps in not speaking, I had "dammed" the area, stunting language production in the form of writing as well. The hypothesis was intriguing, but whatever the scientific truth, one thing was made certain: thought and speech are intricately bound, and words dominate both realms. But there is a remainder in thought with the removal of words, a residue of consciousness left behind in the sieve...Much in the same, there is a large percentage of communication to be accounted for (93%, according to a study at UCLA Santa Cruz) that is nonverbal. So what is it that is "left behind" after words pass through the filter of consciousness?