“Just put this here and then I can go,” you mutter. Suddenly you realize you’re saying it out loud and there’s no one around. Do you have this more often? Radar asked professor Bart Geurts (Radboud University) why you actually do it and whether it can do any harm at all.
By talking to yourself we mean talking out loud when no one is around. You can mumble, speak in a clear voice, and everything in between.
Why do we actually talk to ourselves?
‘If we talk to ourselves instead of to friends, all kinds of things can be going on,’ says Geurts. ‘It can be about remembering a shopping list or about studying a poem. When you do things like this, you often do it in a linguistic form.’ Talking to yourself is therefore multifunctional; to better remember the information.
Why do I talk to myself more often than my brother or sister?
According to Geurts, it is known that some people talk more to themselves than others, but there is no clear reason for this. ‘It is not easy to measure. There is an experiment where people are put in a certain situation so that they start talking to themselves. This differs per person.’
What is known is that children start talking to themselves around the age of three, usually aloud. ‘This becomes much less from the age of six or seven. After that, I think people will continue to use talking out loud mentally. I think everyone does that.’
Talking out loud to yourself can also involve doing a task that isn’t routine. You often see that people start talking to themselves. An example: there was an experiment in which adults had to fold an airplane. With the first plane they still talked to themselves, but as soon as they folded several planes, that decreased. It became routine.’ This is also observed in children: if they are given a more difficult task that is not routine, self-talk starts to play a role again.
Why does that change at all as you get older?
So, as children get older, they talk less out loud to themselves. According to Geurts, safety can sometimes play a role. “Some parents think that talking to yourself is bad and that you shouldn’t do it. But it is mainly a matter of learning. Children have a lot more to learn and they find many things more difficult than we find.’ Children do this to process information.
Is everyone talking to themselves?
‘We don’t officially know whether everyone talks to themselves,’ says Geurts. “But in that experiment I talked about earlier, everyone talked to themselves or out loud. Everyone was asked if they had talked to themselves and everyone said ‘no’.’ According to Geurts, people don’t always know they’re doing it. “They don’t register it. It seems very likely to me that people who speak a language, which are by far the most, also use that language when they are alone.’
Source: ANP