Thinking out loud

> Rest assured that talking to yourself is not a sign of mental illness but a healthy indication that what you say matters

BEING caught talking to yourself, especially if using your own name in the conversation, is beyond embarrassing. And it’s no wonder – it makes you look like you are hallucinating.

Clearly, this is because the entire purpose of talking aloud is to communicate with others.

But given that so many of us do talk to ourselves, could it be normal after all – or perhaps even healthy?

We actually talk to ourselves silently all the time. I don’t just mean the odd “where are my keys?” comment.

We actually often engage in deep, transcendental conversations at 3am, with nobody but our own thoughts to answer back.

This inner talk is very healthy indeed, having a special role in keeping our minds fit. It helps us organise our thoughts, plan actions, consolidate memory and modulate emotions.

In other words, it helps us control ourselves.

Talking out loud can be an extension of this silent inner talk, caused when a certain motor command is triggered involuntarily.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget observed that toddlers begin to control their actions as soon as they start developing language.

When approaching a hot surface, the toddler will typically say: “Hot, hot”, out loud and move away. This kind of behaviour can continue into adulthood.

In a fascinating study, researchers found that our brains can operate much like those of monkeys if we just stop talking to ourselves – whether it is silently or out loud.

This study showed that talking to ourselves is probably not the only way to control our behaviour, but it is the one that we prefer and use by default.

But this doesn’t mean that we can always control what we say. Indeed, there are many situations in which our inner talk can become problematic.

However, telling yourself not to think only sends your mind wandering, activating all kinds of thoughts – including inner talk – in an almost random way.

This kind of mental activation is very difficult to control, but seems to be suppressed when we focus on something with a purpose.

Reading a book, for example, should be able to suppress inner talk quite efficiently, making it a favourite activity to relax our minds before falling asleep.

But researchers have found that patients suffering from anxiety or depression activate these ‘random’ thoughts even when they are trying to perform some unrelated task.

Our mental health seems to depend on both our ability to activate thoughts relevant to the current task and to suppress the irrelevant ones – mental noise.

Not surprisingly, several clinical techniques, such as mindfulness, aim to declutter the mind and reduce stress.

When mind wandering becomes completely out of control, we enter a dreamlike state displaying incoherent and context-inappropriate talk that could be described as mental illness.

Much of the benefit of talking out loud appears to come from simply hearing oneself, as auditory commands seem to be better controllers of behaviour than written ones.

Our results demonstrated that, even if we talk to ourselves to gain control during challenging tasks, performance substantially improves when we do it out loud.

This can probably help explain why so many sports professionals, such as tennis players, frequently talk to themselves during competitions, often at crucial points in a game, saying things like “Come on!” to help them stay focused.

Our ability to generate explicit self instructions is actually one of the best tools we have for cognitive control, and it simply works better when said aloud. So there you have it. Talking out loud, when the mind is not wandering, could actually be a sign of high cognitive functioning.

The stereotype of the mad scientist talking to themselves, might reflect the reality of geniuses who use all the means at their disposal to increase their brain power. – The Independent

Dr Paloma Mari-Beffa is a senior lecturer at Bangor University’s School of Psychology in the UK.