What if you stop talking

What if tomorrow you woke up and decided that you were going to stop speaking? Not for a day, not for a week — but for, say, twenty years. What effect would if have on your body? What effect would if have on your mind?

Before we begin, it's important to clarify that we're talking about the effects of long-term, self-imposed silence. The deliberate cessation of speech is fundamentally different from pathological conditions that affect our ability to talk, like dysarthria, dysphonia and aphonia. These are disorders that can be attributed to brain injury, neurological malfunction, and/or the impairment of muscles that help produce speech. We'll reference these conditions later on.

But for the purposes of our discussion, we assume an otherwise healthy person who, for whatever reason, has chosen to stop talking.

Phonation, or the production of speech, relies on the complex coordination of several anatomical features, but it's helpful to think of it as a sequence-dependent process that starts in your brain, proceeds through your voice box, and ends in the resonating cavities of your throat, mouth and nose. Tinker with any part of the sequence and you'll hear changes at the end of the line. Singer Barbra Streisand (who is famous not only for her impressive vocal abilities, but her large nose), when asked what she thought it was that made her sound so unique, once attributed her voice to the sound-modulating qualities of her deviated septum. "If I ever had my nose fixed," she told her interviewer, "it would ruin my career."

Even more important than her nose, however, are Streisand's vocal cords. Also known as vocal folds, these two bands of smooth muscle are positioned opposite one another in your larynx, or voice box. When you decide to speak, your brain signals for these vocal folds to snap together as air from the lungs is forced between them by your diaphragm, a sheet of muscle positioned below your lungs. This causes your folds to vibrate.so you should not think of stop talking.