What Our Vocal Apparatus Demonstrates about Conscious Awareness

Our vocal tract is one of our most complex bodily systems that our brains control voluntarily, yet it is mostly out of sight and “out of mind”.

Figure by by Aykefam Azene

If you are like most people, and like me before I took courses in articulatory phonetics, you only have a vague idea of what goes on in your body as you talk. It’s simply not necessary to be aware of those details in most situations. Yet we can learn them and learn to pay attention to them consciously.

So what does that tell us about consciousness?

I’m not going to explain the details of speech here. Rather, I will start with our naive understanding. Most of us know that speaking involves our tongues, our teeth, sometimes our noses — parts we can see in a mirror — and things we often inaccurately call our “vocal cords”. That’s it — no mention of our hard and soft palates, uvula, and epiglottis — other parts, along with our lungs and diaphragms, that we can control as we speak.

We have an even simpler understanding of how our hearing of speech works, which we can improve by studying acoustic phonetics. But let’s get back to the question of consciousness.

First, it’s clear that our “consciousness” of speaking is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. True, some of us may talk in our sleep, but even…