There&#x27;s some interesting things in this article, other than the &quot;universal&quot; gap. Tidbits like this:<p>&gt; &quot;The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve a single word from memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from grammatical cues to changes in pitch. We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain, while similarly building our hypothetical rejoinder, all using largely overlapping neural circuits.&quot;<p>Makes sense. I (and I&#x27;m assuming everyone) will have stories&#x2F;anecdotes&#x2F;arguments at the ready during a conversation, and they&#x27;ll vary and change based on what the other parties are saying. I just didn&#x27;t realize that this was a necessary thing.