What Happens When Your Mouth Outruns Your Brain | #217

Have you ever said “um” one too many times, forgotten a basic word, mixed up two sounds, or completely abandoned a sentence because your brain and mouth stopped cooperating?
In this episode of The Neurodivergent Creative, Caitlin dives into the fascinating, funny, and surprisingly complex world of filler words, speech disfluencies, spoonerisms, verbal mix-ups, and the tiny linguistic detours our brains take while trying to communicate.
From accidentally saying “fart cone” instead of “car phone” to getting trapped in a “once a ton of pine” loop, Caitlin explores why our words sometimes come out scrambled—especially when we are tired, distracted, stressed, excited, multitasking, or experiencing executive dysfunction.
💬" We use filler words a lot, and they're normal, and they're not bad grammar, and they're not ignorant, and they don't mean that you are stupid or uneducated. They're a normal part of human speech." - Caitlin Liz Fisher
What We Explore in This Episode:
- Why filler words are a normal part of human speech
- The difference between spoonerisms, malapropisms, revisions, and repetitions
- How burnout and executive dysfunction can affect word retrieval
- What current research suggests about ADHD and speech disfluency
- How filler words function as social and conversational cues
- Why disfluencies are not personal failures that need to be eliminated