Are people less talkative these days?

Four people enjoying churros with coffee at an outdoor cafe table, engaging in conversation and laughter.

Occasionally, I have what feels like an extraordinarily talkative day, loaded with meetings, calls or friendly chatter. Maybe you can relate. It seems natural enough to wonder, then: what’s an ‘ordinary’ amount of talk?

If you look up how many words we speak per day, you’ll find varying estimates online. Often, they’re linked to gender – specifically, whether it’s true that women talk more than men. A widely cited 2007 study of university students suggested not.

However: scientists recently published an update based on a more diverse sample of talkers. Their data comes from previous studies in which people of various ages – in the United States, Australia, Serbia and Switzerland – were audio-recorded as they went about their days. On the whole, they found that women (at an estimated 13,349 words per day) did tend to speak more than men (11,950), on average. The evidence was ‘conclusive’ only for adults aged 25 to 64 (women: 21,845 words per day; men: 18,570).

It’s tempting to mention this finding to my wife and our couple friends to see what sort of debates (or nods of recognition) ensue. But another key finding is huge variation, regardless of gender: one man produced fewer than 100 words per day, some people more than 120,000; the overall average was around 13,000. This makes me wonder where I’d fall on the wide spectrum between mime and telemarketer. Short of my own personal electronically activated recorder (or EAR) study, I’ll never know for sure.

Finally, with eyes affixed to our screens, we might wonder if people do less actual talking than they used to. Well, for each year that passed between 2005 and 2018, study participants spoke about 300 fewer words per day. If that finding holds up, it could mean we’ve shed thousands of words per day in recent years.

by Matt Huston

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Does some part of you wish you were talking to others more than you do now? Check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Come Out of Your Shell’ (2025) by Christian Jarrett.

The story ‘The Anti-Social Century’ (2025) by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic dives into the long-term decline in socialising among people in the US.


An unlikely meeting that shaped history

Black and white photo of soldiers and damaged tanks under trees in a wartime setting. One soldier crouches in the foreground.

In 1917, France was on the brink of calamity. The great incinerator known as the Western Front consumed young men as voraciously as ever; supplies dwindled; mutinous unrest percolated in the ranks. Desperate for American intervention to tip the balance against the Central Powers, the French prime minister Aristide Briand pled for the US president Woodrow Wilson to commit his huge country to the war. But Wilson, messianic and haughty, bided his time.

Briand huddled with his ministers. They needed a new tactic, something unexpected. What if, someone bravely suggested, we send a philosopher to Washington, DC and see what he can do?

That philosopher was Henri Bergson, an extraordinarily popular thinker whose public lectures on time, memory, and the élan vital packed auditoriums with swooning fans: he appeared to imbue life with the creativity and mystery that science seemed to diminish. Passionately patriotic, he accepted the mission and took a liner to Washington.

Black and white photo of a man in a suit, Henri Bergson, sitting in a library with bookshelves and a desk filled with papers.

Henri Bergson in his study. Courtesy the BnF, Paris

Bergson was granted an audience with the president, whose self-love was most intense when it came to his own intellect. They talked for hours. Bergson played his cards well: he appealed to Wilson’s desire to strut the world stage as the bringer of peace, the founder of the League of Nations. They plumbed Bergson’s philosophy, which he said implied that the Germans were the enemies of civilisation. A few weeks later, the United States was at war.

I don’t want to give too much credit to Bergson – and I don’t think the US should have joined the war – though at least one Wilson adviser said that Bergson gave the president the push he needed. This little-known story of the philosopher and the president is remarkable: it is perhaps the most important diplomatic intervention by a philosopher, and a reminder, as if we needed it, of the extraordinary consequences of unlikely meetings.

by Sam Dresser

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Well worth a read is the wonderful Aeon essay ‘Henri Bergson, Celebrity’ (2019) by Emily Herring on the philosopher’s immense popularity, particularly with women.

To read (a lot) more about the meeting between Bergson and Wilson, the paper ‘The Philosopher and the Rooster’ (2020) by Geert Somsen has everything you need.


NOTE TO SELFCAREGIVING

Caregivers have more youthful brains

A man with a beard sitting on a sofa with two young children, one resting on his head, in a room with bookshelves.

My twins turned 11 the other day. I’m thankful the endless nappy changing and interrupted nights of their infancy are in the distant past. But there are new stresses, such as becoming an on-call chauffeur – to parties, sleepovers and sports clubs. Then, as now, the end result is similar: I’m frazzled most of the time. Ask me to guess and I’d say that being a parent has probably accelerated my brain age. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a new paper in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by James K Rilling and colleagues that claims caregiving – including being a dad – is associated with having a brain that’s young for your age.

The study builds on past research that found mothers and fathers in their 50s had a younger ‘brain age’ compared with their childless peers – by about half a year. This was based on measures of their brain structure, such as white- and grey-matter volume, as judged against databases of hundreds of brains of various ages. The new study extended this pattern to grandmothers and people caring for someone with dementia, and the findings suggested the brain age benefit might be even greater later in life. Compared with controls, grandmothers and caregivers had brain ages that were between four and six years younger, on average (after adjusting for other factors such as income and BMI). Both the old research and the new suggest there’s a sweet spot – too many (grand)kids or too much stress and the brain benefits are reduced.

As to why caregiving is associated with lower brain age, the researchers propose various reasons, such as being more mentally and physically active, the emotional connection, and the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from being a caregiver. My brain feels tired, but it’s nice to know the responsibilities of parenthood might be keeping it youthful!

by Christian Jarrett

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I first wrote about the neural consequences of fatherhood 11 years ago for Wired in the article ‘How Becoming a Father Changes Your Brain’ (2014).

In the Psyche Guide ‘How to Get the Most Out of Caregiving’ (2024), Elissa Strauss shows how to see the challenges of caregiving in a positive light.


The benefits of thinking about deep time

A mountain peak with a walking path and hikers, under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds.

Last September, I took part in a ‘Deep Time Walk’: a 4.6 km hike through the Welsh countryside, mirroring 4.6 billion years of Earth history. As the kilometres passed, our guide took us from the Precambrian to the Holocene, stopping periodically to share pivotal moments: life’s origin, cataclysmic bombardments, mass extinctions. Every metre we stepped was a million years.

In the last moments of the walk – our legs well exercised by this point – our guide pulled out a tape measure. The last 30 cm of the 4.6 km, he explained, represent Homo Sapiens. The final half-centimetre? Recorded human history. And right at the end, some of humanity’s most consequential events – the invention of the printing press, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – could all squeeze into the final millimetre. After walking for kilometres through Earth’s past, I felt a sublime smallness, but also awe.

A growing body of research suggests there are myriad psychological benefits to feeling small in the face of nature’s vastness: it dampens the ego, and can foster feelings of humility, reciprocity and generosity. Most of these studies have focused on the physical world – boundless landscapes or the enormity of the cosmos, for instance – but one recent paper, by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, showed there are also upsides to experiencing smallness in time.

Rather than go on a walk, the researchers simply showed people a video that compressed the Universe’s 14-billion-year history into one year, then asked them to reflect on how human history and their lives fit within that story. The psychologists wondered if it might prompt thoughts of mortality, but the effects were actually positive: in particular, people reported greater self-forgiveness and lower anxiety.

Our time on Earth is short – and, from the planet’s perspective, we are just flashes of sunlight on a pond – but it turns out that embracing that fact could be good for you.

by Richard Fisher

FIND OUT MORE

Watch the clip, used in the study by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, that compressed the 14-billion-year history of the Universe into a year, edited from the US TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

You can discover more about Deep Time Walks, or download the app to walk one wherever you are.

My Psyche Guide ‘How to Do Mental Time Travel’ (2024) and my book The Long View (2023) both explore how to take a longer perspective of time.


True contact is found in silence

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting under an umbrella; the woman leans on the man’s shoulder.

When I was an adolescent, time spent with my first girlfriend – a title very quickly rescinded – was as exhilarating as it was onerous. The cause of the former was straightforward, but that of the latter was specific to that juncture in my life: I felt that a beat of dead air was a solemn mark against me, and every moment must be filled with witty and memorable words. Before our meetings, I would tabulate, sometimes physically putting to paper, all the interesting, intriguing, titillating things I could mention. I treated hanging out like a state examination. You can imagine why she lunged at the first opportunity to become an ex.

But we remained – and remain – close friends, and some time after our ill-starred relationship ended, something indelible happened: we had our first real silence. Late in a balmy summer night, conversation extinguished itself and, for some reason, nothing else was said. I’ve had a lot of beautiful silences since then, but it remains the most poignant.

I was reminded of this experience by Emil Cioran, the brooding and sardonic Romanian French philosopher, who was actually capable of stringing together witty and memorable words. ‘True contact between beings,’ he wrote, ‘is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.’

Silences between people, of course, have all sorts of meanings, and Cioran is far from the only philosopher to write about silence. But here he incomparably evokes the strange intimacy that inheres in the best kinds of silence. Perhaps the next time you are fortunate enough to inhabit this kind of silence with someone important to you, you’ll think of ‘true contact’.

by Sam Dresser

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The delightful Psyche Video ‘Le Mots de la Carpe’ by the French animator Lucrèce Andreae shows how silence can be path to love in the cacophony of speed-dating.

For more on Cioran’s minimalist approach to life, see the Psyche Idea ‘Learning to Be a Loser: A Philosopher’s Case for Doing Nothing’ (2023) by Costica Bradatan.

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