Talking to yourself usually is considered to be embarrassing. It might also make you look as you are hallucinating, because we are talking loud when we communicate with other people.
However, we often talk to ourselves silently. Even though self-talk makes us look insane, research shows that it is a sign of a high level of intelligence. Talking to yourself may be healthy, as it keeps your mind fit.
In addition, it might help you to make plans, organize your thoughts, balance your emotions and concentrate. This indicates that talking to yourself may help you to be in control of yourself.
A study published by the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that talking to yourself can prepare the brain for better recognition of objects. Moreover, it can help you to enhance the brain’s memory centers. In fact, talking to yourself is an excellent way to understand what you are learning.
Furthermore, saying loud the name of an object while you are looking at it can prepare the brain sensors to function better. However, if you do not know the name of the object you are looking at, you can get confused.
For example, in a 2011-study, 20 people were given the name of an object (e.g. an apple) to look for in a market both aloud and then silent while they looked for the object in the market.
The study showed that the participants found the object easily while they spoke to themselves, as thinking and talking out loud helped them enhance their memory. Namely, speaking improved searching, suggesting that there was a relation between the visual target and the name.
In addition, a group of researchers at the University of Bangor in the United Kingdom claimed that talking to yourself is not only beneficial for you, but it also may indicate that you are highly intelligent.
Moreover, the participants in the study were given a list of written instructions to read them out load or silently. Their task performation and concentration of the participants were measured.
The researchers found out that that the participants, who read the instructions out loud, were more memorized, absorbed and concentrated than those who read them silently.
Dr. Paloma Mari-Beffa, a psychologist, thinks that talking to yourself is beneficial, as auditory commands can control behavior better than the written commands. Even if you talk to yourself during challenging tasks, your performance improves when you do it out loud rather than silently.
She explains that the benefits might be coming for hearing oneself. According to her, talking to yourself out loud can help you control yourself by organizing your thoughts, plans, memories and actions.
Even though talking to yourself may seem like madness, science claims that it is a habit of geniuses.
