DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF? Why do people talk to themselves? The humorous response

DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF?

Why do people talk to themselves? The humorous response is “So that I have someone intelligent to talk to.” But humor aside, the traditional psychologist’s argument has been that by involving more senses, verbalization helps to block out distractions, and to focus our thinking – especially when alone, and when under stress or when we want to plan.

But in Daniel Kahneman’s language, it means “System 2’s intentional system can more easily take control of System 1’s automatic system”. I tend to think of it as intentionally inserting stimulation into system 1.

System 1 is very, very loud in my head. That’s why I like to be around people. They keep me linked to the real world despite the bright and intense mental reality that emerges from System 1, in someone who has such exceptional memory. I think all mild “Aspies” have this problem, and all Autistic people are complete victims of it.

Does this sound like I’m happy to intellectualize talking to myself? It does. It also explains why I’m more likely to do it when I’m tired and surrounded by a lot of stimulation: the need to crowd out the sensory data so that I can focus on whatever it is I’m trying to concentrate upon. Most Aspies and all Autistics cannot as easily filter stimuli as well as normal people.

Perhaps I’ll feel a smidgen less guilty about talking to myself when I’m trying to plan the rest of my day from now on – but I doubt it.

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PLEASE READ

Please read “Thinking Fast And Slow”. For those people who haven’t kept up with research in psychology, he’s condensed the past half century into a few narratives which will help you understand our world better. And most importantly for conservatives and libertarians, he’s helped explain why conservatives are right in their concern about human hubris in everything – because we are intuitive more than rational and our intuition is terrible at statistics. In fact, the fact that we need the field of statistics is an attempt to overcome our incompetence in judgements about complex relations.