Psychology: "Why Do 'Normal' People Talk to Themselves?"
"Why Do 'Normal' People Talk to Themselves?"
By C. Claiborne Ray
Q. Why do “normal” people talk to themselves?
A. The old joke is that it is the only way to be sure of having an intelligent conversation, but it has some real uses. “Young children often conduct a conversation with an imaginary friend, or a real friend who just happens not to be there,” said Randy Engle, a professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And, he said, it is a normal part of development.
When adults talk to themselves, Professor Engle said, it could reflect a mental disease, but most people do it. While he said he was not aware of extensive investigations of why, he suggested two explanations. “One is that when we are reading something that is quite complex, it helps to verbalize it aloud,” he said, “because hearing it, and hearing the language, gives us another cue for remembering those exact words. Listening to our internal auditory memory has been found to be quite helpful to understand a particularly complex sentence.”
A second reason, he said, involves something called prospective memory. “As we get older, our ability to remember to do things we intend to do gets worse,” he said. Like string around the finger, hearing ourselves talk about these things can help us to remember to do them. It could be something as simple as talking about picking up the laundry, he said, but the trick is best saved for an important plan that involves breaking a normal routine. “If we did it every time we wanted to remember something all day, it wouldn’t work,” he said. “One thing we know about cognition is that it works best with something different or novel.”
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