Introduction: The challenges of public speaking in a second langauge

Why it is so difficult to make a speech in a second language

Many people imagine their brains as a giant library, or a hard-disk:  It has a lot of information organized somehow, with a central directory where you can lookup any information you need.  So if you’re looking for an English word (of how to drive a car, or what to dress for an occasion) you open the directory and find it. Well, that’s not how the brain works, and if you treat it as a ‘hard-disk’ or a library you’ll just get lost again and again.

In fact our brain is an enormous collection of nerve cells (called ‘neurons‘) connected in a super-complex web of connections (called ‘synapses’).  Each neuron has a tiny amount of information, and it’s only when billions of them are connected that they, what’s the phrase? “start making sense”.  The mechanism is so complicated that scientsts only know the rough outlines of how this is done, but here’s a cute story from 20 years ago, that will help you understand how yor brain stores English vocabulary – and how to protect it from damages.

How neurons are a bit like pirated music online

This story is a bit funny and some older readers lived it as college students, but it’s enormously important for understanding our brain and we’ll return to it many times during this course, so please pay attention.

It beings with college students pirating music.  Way back in the 1990’s the new inventions of the internet and mp3 music files made it possible for people to share songs online.  In those days the Apple Appstore didn’t exist, and neither did spotify or google play – so there wasn’t any good, legal way for people to purchase songs online. So college students started ripping them from their cd’s and sharing them with friends. And then came Napster.

Napster was the first peer-to-peer music sharing app – and it was a smash hit.  You installed it, it scanned your pc (No smartphones back then…) for music you had and made it available for others.  At the same time it made all their music available for you.   You just searched the Napster database for a song you liked (‘hit me baby one more time’ was enormously popular back then), Napster looked up which computer in your area had it, made the connection, and you could download it.  Free of charge.

As millions and millions of people shared pirated music on Napster the record companies panicked.  They sued Napster, got an injunction, and shut Napster down.  That was fairly easy, because all they had to do was turn of the directory. And suddenly no one could use Napster to download free music.

College students worldwide were furious, and two of them started a swedisch company called ‘Kazaa‘ that managed to overcome that central-directory weakness Napster had by creating a true peer-to-peer network modeled on how our brain works.  Which brings us back to the English vocabulary problem we started talking about: this is where the story is not just interesting but actually start offering insights (and pretty soon solutions too. Stay with me).

So Kazaa also scanned your computer like Napster to find what music you had. But instead of being connected to a central database like Napster, Kazaa connected you to 10 computers around you that had Kazaa installed. If you searched  for ‘Hit me baby’ it would look the file in those 10 computers, and assuming one of them had it (this was the 1990’s after all), a connection was made and downloading commenced.

And if none of them had it?  Well, then Kazaa had each of them connected to another 10 computers and surely those had the song. No worry there.  More obscure songs were a problem, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Now let’s talk about brains and English vocabulary:

And how is that story related to Vocabulary and brain?

Our brain works similar to Kazaa.  Each computer is like a neuron, and the connections are like synapses, and everytime a neuron is looking for a bit of information it checks with one of its contacts and retrieves it.  And if the contacted neuron doesn’t have it, it will check with its connected neurons, and the information will be retrieved.

Similarly, if our neurons are looking for a common word (‘fruit’, ‘car’) they’ll find it instantaneously.  So fast, in fact, that we don’t even notice there’s a process going on.

There is no central database, but there’s no need for one because our brain retrieves enormous amounts of information all the time.  Just look at how I just wrote and you just read almost a 1000 words about brains, and computers, and the 90’s without noticing it…

Until the word we’re looking for is missing.

If the word we are looking for is less common (‘watermelon’ or ‘taxicab’) our brain will take longer to find it

Previously I told the story of the college student looking up Britney Spears and assumed the information was widespread and readily available.  But what if it isn’t?  What if instead of looking for Britney spears mega-hit I was  looking for Nik Kershaw’s ‘the riddle‘? None of my immediate 10 connections had it.  In fact there’s a fair chance that none of their 100 connections or even THEIR  1000 connections would have it.  And this expanding search takes time.  And freezes Kazaa for a few moments.  Same with our brain.

If I were looking for a common English vocabulary word, such as ‘songs’ or ‘money’ or simply ‘word’ then my brain stores it in many places and access would be immediate.  But if I were looking for more complicated alternative for those words such as ‘Lyrics’ or ‘ Finance’ or ‘synonym’ that would force my brain to expand the search. And that would take time. And would sound like ‘Ahhh‘  and ‘Emmm‘ or maybe ‘like’ and ‘you-know’ – The so-called filler words.

And if the information is even less common?

The search will take longer and once it takes more than a few millisconds ther ‘eehh’s and ‘umm’s no longer mask it.  And then we have a black-out.  That’s when information we thought we had is not available for us.  This is where our active vocabulary is smaller than we thought and we are stuck.

What do peer-to-peer music sharing teach us about this situation?  An imortant lesson on preserving resources in our brain.  Let’s imagine that we’re looking for a really obscure recording of Nik Kershaw performing ‘The Riddle’ in the live aid in 1985 – This might take Kazaa millions and millions of searches.  And at some point it has to consider the possibility that the information just doesn’t exist.  Maybe Nik Kershaw never performed in the Live-Aid?  That is when an ‘abort’ command is issued and the search returns blank.

Our brain has a nice work-around solution.  If it suspects that a piece of information doesn’t exist it will warn us in advance.  If I am asked to talk a bout a subject I have no knowledge about I will appologize in advance.

So what are we trying to Achieve in this course?

Now that we learned how our brain work, the rest of this course will teach us the skills to make the most out of this neural-network between our ears:

• How to overcome ‘ehhs’ and ‘ahhs’ by maximizing our search time (section 2)
• How not to be paralyzed by missing words by reducing our anxiety (section 3)
• How to prevent black-outs from occuring by preloading vocabulary using structure (section 4)
• How to engage our mind so it delivers maximum performance using stories and questions (section 5)
• How to prepare a speech and our brain for bes delivery using prep techinques (section 6)
• How to think like a native speaker by removing our native language from the system (section 8)

Good luck!