I have an uncle who is a scientist. He speaks very slowly. And he leaves long pauses between his sentences. The reason for that is that he actually thinks through what he says. There is relatively little 'signal', but the value of what he says is large enough to make up for the low bitrate.

I think that was Jemka's point. Sidnal/noise ratio is not the same thing as throughput.

For instance imagine that instead of stopping to think, your uncle turned on the radio during the pauses. The same amount of useful information would be transmitted but we would not say that both scenarios are equally desirable.

Silence is the desirable pause method. It allows the audience to absorb and understand the signal better.

In your example, the "signal" would be what he says and I'm assuming you mean the silence to be the "noise". Large enough gaps between information could lead to a distortion of the message, regardless of how profound the information may be.