Talking fast without pausing can cause anxiety, because if you do not allow the audience to take a break it will feel overwhelmed with information. In a sense, it is like drinking water without breathing. It can be cool for a short while, but even if you are really thirsty, you will find that the need for air is more compelling than the need for water. That is why, pouring water into someone’s throat is such an effective torturing technique.

Pause is the remedy. Nevertheless, there are cases when the lack of pause can be an effective tool. Not to torture, but to communicate. Willie Smits makes a brilliant use of this technique in his TED talk. I encourage you to spend 20 minutes to watch it.

He starts slowly, apparently talking about an innocent encounter with an orangutan. He gets the audience to applaud his effort to salvage this and other 1000 orangutans, but he takes everyone by surprise with:

No, no, wrong! It’s horrible! It’s a proof of our failure to save them in the wild!
Willie Smits

He makes a swift transition to the larger problem of deforestation and points to the ecological, economical and human tragedy behind it. He then switches gears, and pours down a tone of details of how they reversed the tide by re-growing a huge rainforest that now serves as a habitat not only for orangutans, but for a whole range of other species, while also being economically beneficial for the people.

We learn how he picked the worst place he could think of so that no one will have an excuse in saying that it is not possible. We learn how they planned the work by splitting it into smaller pieces, by measuring and by involving the local inhabitants. He then goes down into small scale details like how they approached the agroforestry not by the text book, which says to by growing crops between trees to reduce the competition between trees and to help fertilizing them, but by first tackling fire by planting sugar palms.

And he goes on and on. No pause until the very end, just tons and tons of details of the various facets of the problem and the afferent solutions. It’s basically impossible to remember all of them, but that is not the goal. The whole point of these details is to reveal the scale of complexity of the problem at hand. The lack of pause is used to build the case for the one message summarized in just one word: integration.

I just love this talk and the amazing work it tells.