A psychiatrist working at Yale University, George Mahl, counted and examined ten speech disfluencies (including the infamous "uh" and "um") with the purpose of measuring a person's anxiety level.  He calculated that, on average, during every 4.4 seconds of spontaneous speech, one disfluency occurs in a person's speaking.   (Source)

Just like yesterday, I want to take a moment and repost a few very insightful comments left by the Cranial Collision community. Today we're focusing on responses to my article about how the Obesity Action Coalition is destroying the concept of personal responsibility. Hopefully this illustrates just how passionate we are about quality conversation and people voicing their well-thought-out opinions!

Image by b_d_solis

Here on Cranial Collision, we are all about conversation. We want this place to be a community where we can all discuss topics and learn from each other. This isn't a one-way street of information flowing from whoever is writing the article to whoever is reading it. That is why all of your comments are so valuable to us! We find them very mentally stimulating and enlightening.

In case you missed them, I just want to take the time to republish some extremely insightful reader comments from "Darwin the Messiah:"