This moment is known as the sacred pause. It enables all the other steps.

– Search Inside Yourself

Spontaneous processing is often adaptive, as it helps to cope with complex environments efficiently … Notwithstanding its usefulness, social psychology has identified many undesirable outcomes…

 – Flexibility mindsets: Reducing biases that result from spontaneous processing

A run-on sentence is when a comma is used when really the sentence is complete as it is and unable to take on more information without becoming somewhat convoluted. The appropriate punctuation mark to signal the end of a sentence is a full stop. A full stop serves a higher purpose besides meeting the need for grammaticality.

A full stop signals a pause. It also signals that a writer has considered all the possible alternatives and feels quite if not entirely satisfied that nothing more ought to be added lest the poignancy, force or communicative value be diminished. This pause allows the writer to contemplate the necessity of a new sentence and how that new sentence, if it were to take shape, should fit in with its predecessor. It has to fit if it is or needs to be seen as part of a series of sentences.

The pause effected by the full stop allows the writer the mental and emotional space to consider the next sentence. It informs the writer that there is ability to determine the course the journey of the yet to be produced text in its entirety, takes. It allows the writer to choose.

The pause is also helpful for a reader to replenish their supply of attention so that justice, by way of providing the necessary amount of attention, can be done for the next sentence. It allows the reader to take the eyes off and contemplate what has just entered the consciousness. The reader can then decide whether to continue.

Commas also signal pauses but of a different kind. Here, the writer has planned to deliver too much to be intelligible in one chunk and so has sliced up the larger whole into manageable bites considering real and physical (in the sense of possessing a certain finality) limits on processing capacity.

So, when should a comma be used and when should a full stop be used instead? The short and perhaps unhelpful answer (to the extent that this is not about grammar rules per se) is that it depends on the writer’s intention after a careful assessment of goals and options to achieve them.

Pauses are necessary in writing. They are also necessary in thinking. Run-on sentences might occur because they mirror our thought processes which if not mediated by deliberate pauses could run uninterrupted and eventually produce chaos, internally and sometimes also externally as a consequence.

The world of children is one of routines and drills. The world of certain professions is also one of routines and drills. Whatever has no purpose would not continue and that drilling continues unabated is testament to its efficacy in achieving particular purposes. Drilling creates automaticity which is necessary for speed in predictable and perhaps also predicted to be unpredictable situations to the extent that the range of possible variables can be ascertained beforehand.

Indeed, to achieve automaticity is a worthy goal because it could ensure success not least because it frees up a lot of spare capacity for processing. At the same time, automaticity can lead to undesirable outcomes because of flawed thinking patterns. There are times when a pause is necessary to consider an alternative perhaps novel trajectory.

We can consider two such situations which are perhaps quite related.

The first is the internal narrative which runs unbridled leading to intense emotions which compel with perhaps a high success rate, expression in the form of concrete actions. When such emotions are negative, the consequences may be cause for regret.

The second is in the form of cognitive biases which lead to suboptimal outcomes. While biases such as the sunk-cost fallacy have been widely discussed, there are many other less well-known ways our logical mind can deceive us. One example of this is the hard-easy effect (Lichtenstein & Fischhoff,1977).

In both the above-mentioned situations, automaticity tends to be predominant mode and pauses are necessary to short-circuit the otherwise inevitable and bad outcomes.

When it comes to short-circuiting the expression of intense negative emotions, Chade-Meng Tan, who goes by the moniker, Retired Jolly Good Fellow of Google recommends what his then colleague, Jennifer Bevan, termed the Siberian North Railroad – Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect and Respond. Here, the pause acts to jam break an automatic process. It is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful.

When it comes to cognitive biases, which basically cause us to behave automatically in spite of our good sense, a group of researchers published a compilation of their findings this year.

Sassenberg and others (2022) recommend 5 ways to make the best decision or take the most optimal decision despite a strong pull in the opposite direction. Their solution is priming which is “a technique in which the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus” (Cherry, 2021).

These are cognitive and goal conflicts, counter factual thinking, thinking back about the times when one managed to think of a out-of-the-box solution, and adopting what they term a “promotion focus.”

There are times in our lives we know what the most beneficial course of action should be but find ourselves for some unfathomable reason unable to take such course. In these moments, we can induce ‘priming’ before returning to think again about our situation.

We can think about an imagined situation or a real past situation where two goals are/were in conflict – when the achievement of one goal requires the abandonment or neglect of the other. We can also think about a counterfactual – asking what could have been different if one did or did not do something in the past (or in an imagined scenario). 

The researchers distinguished between a promotion focus and a prevention focus. The former focuses on securing a good outcome and the latter on preventing a bad outcome. They shared that thinking about securing a good outcome instead of preventing a bad one helped people deviate from their usual choices, for better outcomes.

Sassenberg and colleagues (2022) had tested each of the above in laboratory settings and found evidence that being primed in these ways reduced the speed of “spontaneous” or automatic responses and allowed for more “flexible” solutions and assessments of situations.

Automaticity is usually the default mode or the desired mode for many situations. This might lead to suboptimal outcomes in some situations. Forcing ourselves to pause and breathe before either reflecting or priming ourselves would enable us to in Chade-Meng Tan’s words go from “compulsion” to “choice”.

The retired jolly good fellow of Google likened the automatic mind to a horse which “we have no control over”. He added, “Once we learn to understand the horse, we learn to communicate and work with it skilfully” and “create choice for ourselves”.

If we go faster, we must pause longer. If we go longer, we must pause faster.

The Brain Dojo