"They'd say if it bothered them"

Here's a comfort a lot of readers hold. If the jump were a problem, people would say so. Nobody says so. Your partner doesn't complain, your colleagues don't complain, your friends ring back. Whatever this book claims, the evidence in your life is that nobody minds.

I'd ask you to look at what "saying so" would involve. Someone would have to stop, in the middle of an ordinary exchange, and say "you interrupted me". That's a confrontation, over something that lasted a second, with a person who meant well. Almost nobody does that. What they do instead is what your partner did with the car park story. They say "no, anyway", and drop it. What Priya did was say "as I was saying". What the friend did was say "right, yeah". Those were the complaints. They were made in the only form that ordinary politeness allows, and you read them as the conversation moving on.

There's a reason the complaint never becomes explicit, and Templeton's study points at it. The signal of connection she measured ran at under a quarter of a second, which is below the level at which people know what they're responding to. Her participants felt more or less connected, and could say so afterwards, but they couldn't have told you it was about response timing. The same is true, I'd suggest, of the people you jump on. They feel something after a conversation with you, a flatness, a sense of not having been quite heard, and they can't say why, because the thing that caused it was a second long and happened in the middle of a sentence. They can't complain about what they can't name. So they don't complain. They just feel it, and over time they bring you less.

The people who did say it, the ones who've actually said "let me finish", said it after years. It's not a sentence anyone reaches for on the first jump, or the hundredth. It's the sentence that comes out when the count has got high enough to overrule politeness, and it's usually said sharply, because it's been held so long. If you've heard it even once, you've heard the end of a very long silence.

Asking directly won't get you a straight answer either. "Do I interrupt you?" gets "sometimes, but it's fine", because the question is asked by the interrupter and the answer is being given to their face. The tally is the honest instrument, and after the tally, the thing to watch is what happens after a jump. Does the story resume, from where it was, with the tail intact? Or does it end with "anyway"? The second is the complaint. Count how often you hear it.