Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking by Nana Ariel
This week, a woman was strolling in my street, walking in circles and
speaking out loud to herself. People were looking at her awkwardly, but
she didn't particularly mind, and continued walking vigorously and
speaking.
Yes, that woman was me.
Like many of us, I talk to myself out loud, though I'm a little unusual
in that I often do it in public spaces. Whenever I want to figure out
an issue, develop an idea or memorise a text, I turn to this odd work
routine. While it's definitely earned me a reputation in my
neighbourhood, it's also improved my thinking and speaking skills
immensely. Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but
a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of
thoughts.
The idea that speaking out loud and thinking are closely related isn't
new. It emerged in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the work of such great
orators as Marcus Tullius Cicero. But perhaps the most intriguing
modern development of the idea appeared in the essay 'On the Gradual
Formation of Thoughts During Speech' (1805) by the German writer
Heinrich von Kleist. Here, Kleist describes his habit of using speech
as a thinking method, and speculates that if we can't discover
something just by thinking about it, we might discover it in the
process of free speech. He writes that we usually hold an abstract
beginning of a thought, but active speech helps to turn the obscure
thought into a whole idea. It's not thought that produces speech but,
rather, speech is a creative process that in turn generates thought.
Just as 'appetite comes with eating', Kleist argues, 'ideas come with
speaking'.
A lot of attention has been given to the power of spoken
self-affirmation as a means of self-empowerment, in the spirit of
positive psychology. However, as Kleist says, talking to oneself is
also a cognitive and intellectual tool that allows for a wider array of
possible use cases. Contemporary theories in cognition and the science
of learning reaffirm Kleist's speculations, and show how self-talk
contributes not only to motivation and emotional regulation, but also
to some higher cognitive functions such as developing metacognition and
reasoning.
If self-talk is so beneficial, why aren't we talking to ourselves all
the time? The dynamic between self-talk and inner speech might explain
the dubious social status of the former. Self-talk is often seen as the
premature equivalent of inner speech - the silent inner voice in our
mind, which has prominent cognitive functions in itself. The tendency
to express our inner thoughts in actual self-talk, typical of children,
is internalised, and transforms to voiceless inner speech in adulthood,
as the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky already speculated in
the 1920s.
Self-talk is deemed legitimate only when done in private, by children,
by people with intellectual disabilities, or in Shakespearean
soliloquies
Vygotsky's view stood in opposition to a competing one from the
psychological school known as behaviourism, which saw children's
self-talk as a byproduct of (supposedly) less competent minds. But
Vygotsky claimed that self-talk has an active mental role. He observed
children performing tasks while speaking to themselves out loud, and
reached the conclusion that their 'private-talk' is a crucial stage in
their mental development. Gradually, a child's interaction with others
turns into an uttered conversation with the self - self-talk - until it
becomes muted inner speech in adulthood. Vygotsky's successors, such as
the psychologist Charles Fernyhough, have demonstrated that inner
speech goes on to facilitate an array of cognitive functions including
problem solving, activating working memory and preparation for social
encounters. It is inner speech rather than self-talk, then, that has
been the focus of research in adults.
However, the internalisation of self-talk isn't necessarily evidence of
cognitive maturity: rather, it could represent the degeneration of an
essential cognitive skill in the face of social pressure. The
sociologist Erving Goffman noted that self-talk is taboo because it is
a 'threat to intersubjectivity' and violates the social assumption that
speech is communicative. As he wrote in his book Forms of Talk (1981):
'There are no circumstances in which we can say: "I'm sorry, I can't
come right now, I'm busy talking to myself".' Self-talk is deemed
legitimate only when done in private, by children, by people with
intellectual disabilities, or in Shakespearean soliloquies.
Yet self-talk enjoys certain advantages over inner speech, even in
adults. First, silent inner speech often appears in a 'condensed' and
partial, form; as Fernyhough has shown, we often tend to speak to
ourselves silently using single words and condensed sentences. Speaking
out loud, by contrast, allows the retrieval of our thoughts in full,
using rhythm and intonation that emphasise their pragmatic and
argumentative meaning, and encourages the creation of developed,
complex ideas.
Not only does speech retrieve pre-existing ideas, it also creates new
information in the retrieval process, just as in the process of
writing. Speaking out loud is inventive and creative - each uttered
word and sentence doesn't just bring forth an existing thought, but
also triggers new mental and linguistic connections. In both cases -
speech and writing - the materiality of language undergoes a
transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn
produces a mental shift. This transformation isn't just about the
translation of thoughts into another set of signs - rather, it adds new
information to the mental process, and generates new mental cascades.
That's why the best solution for creative blocks isn't to try to think
in front of an empty page and simply wait for thoughts to arrive, but
actually to continue to speak and write (anything), trusting this
generative process.
Speaking out loud to yourself also increases the dialogical quality of
our own speech. Although we have no visible addressee, speaking to
ourselves encourages us to actively construct an image of an addressee
and activate one's 'theory of mind' - the ability to understand other
people's mental states, and to speak and act according to their
imagined expectations. Mute inner speech can appear as an inner
dialogue as well, but its truncated form encourages us to create a
'secret' abbreviated language and deploy mental shortcuts. By forcing
us to articulate ourselves more fully, self-talk summons up the image
of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly. In this way, it
allows us to question ourselves more critically by adopting an external
perspective on our ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in our
arguments - all while using our own speech.
You might have noticed, too, that self-talk is often intuitively
performed while the person is moving or walking around. If you've ever
paced back and forth in your room while trying to talk something out,
you've used this technique intuitively. It's no coincidence that we
walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances
thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of
motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive
science concerned with 'embodied' cognition, one prominent claim is
that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That
is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking
or dancing don't start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as
actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a
creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in
turn. It's therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped
in work and study environments that don't allow us to activate these
intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to
avoid them.
Technological developments that make speaking seemingly redundant are
also an obstacle to embracing our full cognitive potential. Recently,
the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk declared that we are marching
towards a near future without language, in which we'll be able to
communicate directly mind-to-mind through neural links. 'Our brain
spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words,' he
said in a recent interview, 'and there's a lot of loss of information
that occurs when compressing a complex concept into words.' However,
what Musk chalks up as 'effort', friction and information loss also
involves cognitive gain. Speech is not merely a conduit for the
transmission of ideas, a replaceable medium for direct communication,
but a generative activity that enhances thinking. Neural links might
ease intersubjective communication, but they won't replace the
technology of thinking-while-speaking. Just as Kleist realised more
than 200 years ago, there are no pre-existing ideas, but rather the
heuristic process by which speech and thought co-construct each other.
So, the next time you see someone strolling and speaking to herself in
your street, wait before judging her - she might just be in the middle
of intensive work. She might be wishing she could say: 'I'm sorry, I
can't chat right now, I'm busy talking to myself.' And maybe, just
maybe, you might find yourself doing the same one day.
https://psyche.co/ideas/talking-out-loud-to-yourself-is-a-technology-for-thinking
