I Found a Weird Pattern in How People `UHMMM'

Excellent video! I've never been so honored to have a few "um"s pointed out.

I think the Q+A bit matches up with my personal theory (without any evidence) that Tom and I have long stretches with fewer uhms because we are flipping between bits of material we have presented to audiences loads of times, with new bits we are talking about for the first time. So I guess you can tell when a speaker is being spontaneous by counting uhms; and be offended if there are none and they are just wheeling out old material.

Fun fact tangentially related to the topic: ‘Um’ Is a very much language specific mid-thought processing buffer. My parents, for reasons of their own, went to language school together as adults To learn Spanish. A point of advise they received from a teacher was that, knowing that you won’t be a native speaker quickly but you need to be passable enough communicate within a short period to later learn through persistent exposure, it was beneficial to pick up certain linguistic attitudes that essentially amount to little flags that point to - in this case - Spanish. One of those little modified behaviors was to replace ‘um’ and its friends with the Spanish appropriate ‘eh’ and crew. The teacher went on to roughly explain the idea that by ‘um’ing in the language you are attempting to speak rather than English that people around you generally are more patient/willing to help. Psychologically you might say the person sees you less as a bumbling foreigner butchering the language and more of a student who is a bit above their head but dutifully trying their best.

8:15 just realized this area is the end of a level for Super Mario Bros. and the busses are a reference to the "frame-rule" concept for which players will often use busses as an example to explain. Not what I expected here lol

My instinctive explanation for why people like Tom Scott have lower averages and higher variations is that during their presentations they go into scripted bouts, a groove where they are explaining something and where the next sentence to say is obvious and comes quickly. And they are very skilled in executing these. But then, in between these sections, when transitioning between segments, or maybe if soemthing else broke their rythm, they revert back to a more natural average like normal people. thus the variation.

If one of my friends told me that he secretely used me as a test subject to collect data for a vaguely scientific project about how people "uhmm", i wouldn't be mad, i'd be impressed.

This is a great example of why interdisciplinary interaction is so essential to science! My dad's a speech pathologist, and as a kid I had a bad stutter. A lot of the problem was actually that I didn't um. So when I'd reach a "bridge" between thoughts, where I needed to connect two ideas together (which might have different familiarity levels), instead of filling my lag time with filler words (um, er, ah, like, so, etc) my brain would grab onto my previous secure point--the last word I said--and repeat it until the connective pathway was established. Like another comment mentioned, this is part of why the rate of 'um' is higher in those who speak quickly: We're covering more ground faster, so the brain has to take more beats to connect ideas. 'Um' becomes like every other words: We use more of them. It's also why people who think quickly--or slowly, too--say um more often. Thoughts grow out of sync with words, and we pause to realign things. As you can probably guess, my 'why' phase lasted about 8 years, and my dad ended up explaining probably a quarter of his graduate program to me in that time. A fascinating blend of linguistics, physiology, psychology, physics, and more!

The most interesting thing to me about uhm/erm/umm/etc. is that it's such a great example of the schwa. The phonetic sound ə ("schwa") is the default sound that humans make. If you just open your mouth and pass air over your vocal chords, you say "ə". Because of that it's the most common sound in almost every language. Three of the four most common English words are "the" ("ðə"), "of" ("əv"), and "a" (just "ə"). The first words of most babies are "məmə"/"dədə"/"pəpə". When I learned about ə I saw it everywhere. Pronouncing words with schwas in place of other vowels is what "mumbling" is. The pitch that is a schwa for a child is the same as the "e" of a grown man, but our brains just account for that. But the coolest thing, to me, is that it's our sound for holding attention. If you were developing morse code or any other form of communication from scratch you would inevitably need to find a way to tell the listener "I'm done talking, it's your turn". In morse code it's ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ , in radio it's "over", in http it's . In English it's silence, so instead we have a signal that means "I'm still talking, it's not your turn yet", and it's exactly what you would expect it might be. əəəəəəəəəəəəə... Kind of elegant, really.

"Maybe your definition of a good time might be different" -- Sadly... its not -_-

I don't remember where I learned it, but the presence of 'uhm's can actually improve the listeners' experience. It's punctuation. Punctuation increases comprehensibility. It can draw attention. An audible expression of "I'm switching gears, in my mind, a little bit" can help the audience prepare for shifting their mental gears and follow the train of thought more smoothly.

3:46 the usage of Julia's Bobby Hill from Drawfee in this video about data & uhmms of science youtubers is the most unexpected easter egg i've ever come across i think

6:40 pop quiz for nerds, attempted answer. We would still observe a Poisson process and the new value for lambda = (1 + p)*lambda My reasoning is that if you missed UHMMs uniformly, then the process remains a Poisson process. However, the rate = lambda would need to increase based on the probability of missing an UHMM per time period.

I too am fundamentally interested in finding real-world examples of probability theory. This is a great example, and your "why" section at the end completely mirrors my thoughts on why I'm interested in this kind of thing. Wonderful work.

Tom Scott 1000% adds ums and other similar pauses to his speeches on purpose. It's something I noticed a long time ago, and I think it's a huge part of why he's so successful at communicating technical information to such a general audience.

this is an INCREDIBLY well made. you had no need to put in as much effort as you did for those adorable blender animations, yet you did. holy cow this must have taken so much work but the end result is so impressive

As a military instructor who had to go thru a multi week course, part of which was to learn how to stop using "um" or any other filler word (which you will do when you begin to eliminate "um") where fellow instructors threw objects at our face during a presentation whenever we would use one, I can say I really appreciate this video, and you bringing the self consciousness about "um"ing to the wider world

Before concluding that this is a fundamental part of how human brains work, it'd be cool to see if the results are the same in other languages. ええと in Japanese, 嗯 in chinese, etc. Specifically I think this could be interesting in Japanese because they tend to use a lot more filler words so it might be a cultural thing and the distribution could be different.

I love the reference to the Mario 1 frame rule analogy in the bus animation

14:54 I don't understand how I managed to catch this but this is truly a bizarre option for background music.

I loved the small Super Mario Bros. speedrunning easter egg when you were explaining the bus averages. I thought it was a nod when you didn't just call it a bus to start with but seeing the staircase and flag made me smile :)