Why Voice Dictation Changes How You Think
I walk on the treadmill for 100 minutes almost every day, and for the first eighty minutes or so I don’t do anything but walk. No phone, no podcast, no distraction. Just the rhythm of walking and whatever my mind decides to do with that space. And then when I’m coming down toward the end of the walk, when I can feel the body is done but the mind is still running, I’ll pull out my phone and turn on the voice memo app and I’ll start talking. I’ll dictate thoughts, whole paragraphs sometimes, pieces that end up becoming blog posts or workshop materials or just fragments that get captured because they’ll be gone in five minutes if I don’t say them out loud. And what’s fascinating is that the act of saying something is completely different from the act of writing something, even when you’re transcribing the speech into written form.
Here’s the thing. When you type, your fingers can’t keep up with your thinking, so you edit as you go. You’re always thinking two moves ahead about what word comes next, or whether the sentence you just finished actually said what you meant, or whether you should backtrack and try a different approach. Your cognition is fractured. You’re generating and evaluating and editing simultaneously, all in real time, and that takes enormous cognitive load. But when you dictate, something shifts. You can’t edit while you’re speaking (well, you can, but it completely breaks the flow), so instead the words just come. You say what you’re thinking as you’re thinking it, and the moment you say it, it’s gone from your working memory. You’ve externalized it. And the second you externalize it, there’s space in your mind for the next thought to surface.
It’s not recording ideas. It’s generating them. That’s the distinction I keep trying to get people to understand, and it’s harder than it should be because it sounds like the same thing until you actually experience it. When you write, you’re trying to capture something that’s already formed in your head. When you dictate, you’re emptying your head so that something else can form. The thought doesn’t exist until you say it, and then once you’ve said it, it’s done and you’re done with it and the next thought is already rising up to take its place.
The obvious thoughts come first. That’s always true. I’ll be walking and thinking about the structure of an exercise, and I’ll start talking about it, and the first five minutes of dictation is just the obvious stuff. The structure I already know, the problem I already see, the solution I already think I have. But the act of saying those obvious things out loud is like draining a cup. You have to empty it completely before the better thoughts can start arriving. And they do. Reliably. About ten or fifteen minutes into a voice memo, after I’ve said all the obvious things and heard myself say them, the thoughts start getting stranger. More specific. More connected to other things I’ve been thinking about. Less safe, which is another way of saying more true.
I can’t actually dictate during the treadmill walk itself. I’ve tried. It breaks something. The rhythm breaks, the thinking breaks, and I end up with disjointed fragments that don’t hold together. It has to be after, when the body is moving but the body is done with its real work, when I’m coasting. That’s when the cognition is free enough to both generate new thoughts and then articulate them.
The transcripts that come back from the voice memo app are usually messy. They have false starts, repetitions, moments where I said the same thing three different ways and the transcription caught all of them. But there’s something in that messiness that’s honest in a way that a draft written at a desk almost never is. The written draft is pre-thought-out. It’s defended. It’s already made compromises to be clear. But a dictated thought still has some of the quality of thinking in it, some of the stumbling and self-correction and uncertainty that’s actually closer to how thought actually moves.
I’ve become suspicious of ideas that come entirely from writing. Not suspicious in a judgmental way, but I notice them now. They have a different texture. They feel more finished too early. They’ve been edited for clarity before they’ve even been born, which means some of the raw possibility has been pruned away before you even get to see it.
What I think is happening cognitively is something about working memory and attention. When you’re managing the motor task of typing at the same time as the cognitive task of thinking, your brain is resource-constrained. You can’t generate as many possibilities because you’re too busy managing the ones you’ve got. But when the motor task is simple and rhythmic (walking, or just standing and talking), it frees up the creative parts of your brain to wander. And the voice memo app gives those wanderings somewhere to land without disrupting the wandering itself.
I have somewhere around 150 voice memos from the last year and a half, and a lot of this blog, a lot of my workshop material, a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about My Design Helper has come from listening to those memos, transcribing the relevant parts, and then building from what I said out loud when I wasn’t trying to be coherent. The ones I’ve used the most aren’t the ones that came out most finished. They’re the ones that had the most strange turns, the most moments where I contradicted myself, the most connections I didn’t see coming.
The other thing that’s shifted is that I’m more comfortable with the fact that thinking doesn’t have to be linear. You can circle back. You can say something, move on, and then come back to it from a different angle five minutes later and realize you were saying the same thing from a different part of the problem. That’s not redundancy. That’s triangulation. You’re finding the truth by approaching it from different vectors, and you can only do that if you’re willing to let the first thought stay incomplete long enough to move to the next one.
Do you have a practice, something like this, where you separate the generation of ideas from the editing of them? What happens in that space?
Further Reading
- 3 Personal Habits That Will Foster Your Creativity (IxDF) — Creative writing habits
- How to Supercharge Yourself to Get More Creative (IxDF) — Techniques to boost creative output
