What talking to yourself actually says about your brain

Muttering under your breath while searching for lost keys. Narrating a recipe out loud while cooking. Working through a tricky problem by explaining it, out loud, to an empty room.

For a long time, talking to yourself carried a faint social stigma, the kind of thing people did quietly and hoped nobody noticed. Research over the past few decades has painted a very different picture.

What the research actually shows

Psychologists distinguish between a few different types of self-talk.

There’s private speech, the running commentary children use out loud as they learn to navigate the world, first described by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky and understood to turn inward in adulthood as what’s called inner speech. There’s also a specific, task-focused version known as self-directed speech, where a person talks themselves through the steps of a task.

The most cited experiment on that last kind comes from Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley, whose 2012 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology asked participants to find a target object among images of other objects.

Those who said the object’s name aloud while searching found it faster than those who searched in silence.

The finding has an important limit that usually gets dropped when it’s repeated. Speaking helped when the word and the object were strongly associated, and actively hurt performance when the label didn’t match the target well. Saying “banana” helps you find a banana. It doesn’t help you find something you can’t quite name.

Self-talk also plays a role in emotional regulation. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan ran seven studies with 585 participants, published in 2014, on what he calls distanced self-talk, referring to yourself by name or as “you” rather than “I” during a stressful moment.

Participants who used the distanced version reported less distress and were rated as performing better under social pressure. Athletes and public speakers use the technique deliberately, coaching themselves through nerves in the third person.

Why it looks like intelligence

The link to intelligence isn’t about volume of talking, it’s about function.

People who talk themselves through complex problems are often externalising their reasoning, laying out each step so it can be checked, corrected and built upon. It’s the same principle behind why teachers ask students to show their working in maths. Speaking a thought aloud forces a level of structure that silent thinking doesn’t always require.

None of this means the person who talks to their houseplants is secretly a genius, or that silence signals lower intelligence. No study has shown self-talk causes or measures intelligence.

Plenty of highly capable people process everything internally and never say a word out loud. Self-talk is a tool, not a requirement, and its usefulness depends heavily on the task and the person.

What the research does suggest is that people should feel less embarrassed doing it.

The habit of muttering through a tricky Excel formula, rehearsing an argument in the shower, or working out loud through a knotty problem isn’t a quirky flaw to hide. It’s often the brain doing exactly what it needs to do, just with the volume turned up.

So next time someone gets caught mid-conversation with themselves, there’s no need for the sheepish laugh and quick explanation. There’s a reasonable chance their brain is simply working the problem out loud, and working it out rather well.