Public Biography
Dr. Terrence Kolbeck is a psycholinguist and the founding director of the Center for Discursive Throughput at the University of Michigan, where he has held a joint appointment in psychology and communication since 2014. He was the principal investigator of Throughput Limits in the Oral Expression of Political Belief, the four-year federally funded study transmitted to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in August 2026.
Dr. Kolbeck holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his dissertation concerned the interval between the formation of an intention to speak and the production of the first word — a gap he measured at a mean of 640 milliseconds and described, in the dissertation’s final chapter, as “the most consequential unexamined moment in human affairs.” He spent nine years at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen before returning to the United States.
His early work concerned ordinary speech disfluency. It was redirected in 2011, he has said, by an experience he has declined to describe in interviews and has described twice in print: an argument with his brother-in-law, conducted over roughly four minutes at a family gathering, after which his brother-in-law repeated back to a third party a position that Dr. Kolbeck had not held and had, in the four minutes, been attempting to disown. He wrote the founding prospectus of the center within the year.
He is the author of The Ordering Problem (MIT Press, 2019) and a co-author of Fidelity Loss in Spoken Belief (2023). He does not accept invitations to appear on live radio.
Dr. Kolbeck lives in Ann Arbor.