Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking
psyche.co
psyche.co
Last time I started a new project and worked on its architecture, I walked over 10km in a single day, according to my cellphone pedometer. In a tiny apartment! This trend lasted for a month, after which I sat down to actually implement this.
I thought it was just me being autistic but it's interesting to know others do it as well :)
I never worked in an office setting, but I can only imagine it would be extremely prejudicial to people like me and the author. Restraining us to a table would limit our output for the sole reason we would be unable to pace and think (no space and too much social pressure).
Anecdata: sometimes I visit my parents and work from their place. I can't pace there because I don't feel comfortable doing so, and that alone is enough for me to not be able to tackle challenging problems there.
At home, this earned me the nickname "satellite". I felt uncomfortably self aware when I just moved in with my partner. Fortunately she finds it soothing.
When I work from the office I take long walks outside when I need to think
I also "occupied" one (very) small meeting room and made it my private office, so I can close the door when I need it
But honestly sometimes talking about the problem with other people works as well as talking with yourself or the laptop
I didn’t read tfa, but my guess is that with more senses involved, you get better short term memory coherence. Waiving your hands around the board or looking at pen-paper and drawing also helps. When in doubt, walk. When it is really hard, bathroom.
Works great.
Your boss might not understand
“Who should we give the promotion to?”
“How about Joe, he’s been killing it this quarter”
“That guy talks to himself. I’m worrying about him killing ME next quarter. Let’s promote Bob instead”
Sometimes i come up with a well phrased final conclusion, but that's more rare i think. Usually it's impossible to follow from the outside.
Only if there are voices you hear in return are you considered "psychotic", with psychosis being defined as seeing or hearing things that are not real or attributed to self.
Our thoughts are real and there is nothing wrong with speaking those thoughts out loud any more than making a Youtube video for others to watch later (even yourself).
I'll pace around talking to myself when prepping for a meeting - it's basically practice for the topics I know we'll be discussing. I even practice responses to what I anticipate their likely responses will be.
It really helps because verbalizing something makes you think more deeply about how to communicate the idea or concept and will sometimes reveal gaps in your understanding or will reveal that you understand it but need to find a good way to concisely convey it to someone else who may not have the same level of expertise.
Practically speaking, it helps get my work done.
[p.s. I've gotten good result with elongated ovals too, btw. The main feature seems to be that the body is "going back to where one started". This seems to help the thinking process.]
My current apartment's topology is such that I can make 8's in it (while thinking of course). I'd never think a simple change in topology can make your thought process a little bit more interesting.
Also, I sloppily "conduct" classical music I'm listening too if I'm working in something hard alone.
Having a private space is nice.
He does the same thing all the time and in one episode even so much as to leave a deep, donut shaped trench in his floor.
I work in an office but since Covid-19 I have been working remotely which has been extremely beneficial for me for this reason.
All my complex architectures and systems were also conceived while pacing, so I hear you, but I never considered walking in circles in a room.
Now I'm curious – is that better than walking outside? Why not walk in nature or a park?
I understand not wanting to walk in a dangerous / unknown area (the pace regime implies full autopilot), but a tiny apartment sounds extreme. And isn't the proximity of external tools – like a computer – distracting to your thought process?
When vocalizing something, you're forced to constrict the blob of complexity you're carrying in your head into a linear narrative, which is by definition simpler. Now that you have simplified the problem you are more likely to get hold of it and solve it.
This happens all the time - when I am solving a technical/logical problem, sometimes I feel like my wife thinks I am just staring blankly at the screen day-dreaming. So I get insecure and start to explain to her how hard the problem is, but because she's a physician I have to translate it into common language first, and 99% of the time I say "never mind, got it" before I have a chance to really bore her.
Come to think of it, this may be how therapy works. You are forced to take all the "mess" that's in your head and narrate it to someone else, in the process getting much simpler perspective on it.
Writing is the same way for me. For example, all the ideas in this post were in my head in some amorphous way, but now that I wrote them out they became neat little analogies I can use in the future.
On a related note: some people close to me like to unload the contents of their head at me. I couldn't understand why - I initially assumed this was a kind of "I need someone to emphasize with me and validate my feelings" thing. Hearing roughly similar thoughts about the same issue for the fifth time in a month got particularly tiresome, and I struggled to understand why these people are doing it. Until one day I looked at the evening "mind dumps" I take in my .org mode file, and it hit me: it's the same thing. It has the same cadence, and same tendency to jump back and forth between related topics. Much like I sort through my thoughts by writing them down in solitude, these people are sorting through their thoughts by talking at me. All that time, I've just been a rubber duck.
That is to say: I think not only this may be how therapy works, I think many (most?) people do this in social context - perhaps being afraid or unacustommed to talking to themselves, or to writing thoughts down (one needs to be a fast typist to write at the speed of thought, which is perhaps why this kind of sorting your thoughts through writing isn't as popular as through talking).
I agree with that. I see my wife maintain her perspective by talking through with friends and family first. I do the same by writing.
As a russian classic said, feelings and emotions turned into words lose their power. Like a deep overwhelming emotion if analyzed and verbalized may turn into “I like her feet” if you didn’t use/know approriate terms or concepts before.
Not necessarily, for example a compiler thinks a tree (AST) is simpler than a linear representation ...
I've found this to also help when I'm doing any sort of creative work or brainstorming, simply talking and explaining as if I'm presenting to an audience helps me generate ideas. Never spoken out loud to myself in public though...
Writing an email or a SO question has a pretty significant upfront investment and requires clearer articulation, whereas real-time chat seems to lead to shallow enquiry.
In other words with real-time chat, the recipient has become the rubber duck.
I personally have always liked writing down my "conclusions" so far into an evolving comment on a defect/bug ticket, which I only actually submit at the end when I've found the real issue. In the end you have a nice explanation of what exactly and why it went wrong and it helps with the actual debugging/thinking it through. And it also helps with the inevitable comments/questions in the PR when people wonder why the hell you are making the change you're making and you have something refer back to.
For myself I do this constantly. Have done it my whole life. I think some people are impressed by my public speaking abilities, how I can often come up with pretty persuasive blurbs on the spot. But I think it’s not impressive at all because I’ve spent so much of my life talking to myself.
I have a hunch a lot of really good comedians and voice actors spend a fair amount of time talking to themselves. I can do a handful of pretty spot on accents. The key? Being a weirdo and messing around with talking to myself in accents frequently.
Sometimes when I get frustrated with some particularly troublesome code while working alone I'll drop into a thick english cockney accent (or at least my best impression) and start trash-talking the code to vent my frustrations. It's pretty cathartic and puts me in a better and slightly humourous mood... better than bottling it up!
Interestingly enough he's recently written an autobiography, which he says sprang from his habit of keeping diaries. He says he's kept diaries for 36 years.
A "learn by talking" and "learn by writing" person, surely.
Obviously humans make less mistakes when they audibly point out circumstances under which they make a decision or perform an action.
I read in a "parentese" style with pauses, higher pitch, and drawn out vowels. I found that I was understanding the material better when I did that. It's not efficient because my reading speed slows down. But just the act of read out loud helped in retaining information.
Doing things out loud could be some sort of "life-hack" to help learn or problem solve.
I'm sure you're doing everything correct and have more then enough dialog with the child, but your phrasing made it sound like it doesn't matter what you read. It definitely does.
From my research, yes, it does matter what you read to the child, but it depends on the age. For someone like my daughter's age, the interaction and pitch is more important than what's being read.
If we know reading simple stuff works, but reading scientific papers a child can't possibly understand only might be OK, then why would you do the latter?
The kid will be fine. It's not as if you won't have conversations with simple words as well. Is my kid gonna understand that Neruda poem about an onion, either? No, but she's developing an ear for poetry, consonance, assonance, rhyme. And she won't be afraid of the word "eigenvector". I grew up with parents who did not know the word "eigenvector" and had friends whose grad student parents could correct their multivariable calculus homework before it got turned in (so she always got perfect scores). We both turned out fine.
Talking to oneself as a technology though does get harder when you get a lot of, "What, mommy?" in response....
I'm not a developmental psychologist, but it seems like early on, you're just throwing phonemes at the child to allow them to learn to cluster the sounds so that later stages in language processing don't have to deal with as much noise and variation. I suspect that as long as you're not switching up the phoneme rules on your kid (T/TD/D vs T/D, R/L vs L, tonal vs. non-tonal, etc.), the actual words used early on don't matter.
Again, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but my guess is that before the brain gets phoneme clustering down, there's too much noise and irrelevant detail being passed along to later processing stages for the brain to make much progress in learning higher-level details of language.
If you are self-conscious like I was when I first started doing this, it helps to put on some kind of headphone, if only to put yourself at peace by the thought "they'll just think I'm talking on the phone".
When I have a good thought, I record it on my phone (or dictate it into Gboard, which works offline) and later upload the mp3 to an app called Otter, which gives extremely good transcription and allow me to search through years' worth of voice notes by text but also be able to instantly hear myself talking from 2 years' ago, which I find to be much more effective for resuming a train of thought than looking at typed notes.
This is sometimes useful to refer back to. E.g., to find a specific command, or to remember the factors behind a choice. But honestly, most of the value is that it requires me to linearize and structure my thinking. The advantage to me over self-speech is that I can put something down and pick it up again later. If I take a break and reread an entry, I come at it with a little distance that helps me see things I was missing before.
I used to keep an org-mode file for every project I was working on, in which I'd brainstorm ongoing issues, but over time, these notes started to leak into my general "daily notes", so my current pattern is: both at work and at home, I keep a YYYY-MM.org (e.g. 2020-12.org) file where I make daily headings and write to myself.
The resulting notes are mostly write-only - they're verbose, and usually take too much effort to read through (unless I anticipate the need for future reference and write a summary on purpose). But all of the benefit comes from the very act of writing - it does wonders for structuring my thoughts, and I find it much better than talking to myself (which I used to do a lot when I was younger). My screen has more space than my working memory, so when doing written notes, my thinking process does much less backtracking.
Get a 2FA code in a message, read it out loud, switch to app, code remembered.
Being bi-lingual I also remember vastly better the 2FA code if I speak it in my native tongue.
0118 999…
Then it's stuck in my head the rest of the day. I won't type the numbers from the chorus to spare you this fate.
I was inspired by the success of "point and call" from the Tokyo train system.
I grew up alone, I had no one to talk to about things which are interesting to me.
I also sometimes have pressured speech, a psychological problem of an unknown origin. But treatment keeps it in check. I have just learned to censor myself when around others.
While this is normally perfectly fine during in-person exams, this year I've gotten warned for looking suspicious because through video surveillance it looks like I'm reading something out for somebody else in the room during exams.
Because it's so ingrained in me, I now concentrate on remembering to not mouth anything rather than on the test itself.
I didn't get anywhere but I'd still encourage you to do the same. If no one explains the problems with these tests to the people paying for them (the teachers, department chairs and employers) than they wont know what's going on either.
"The tongue is the tool of thought,"
Perhaps bonus is the wrong word there.
(And then I can always count on other people to call me on my bullshit, which is another learning opportunity.)
I did not expect the personal thought benefits that come from speaking to yourself in long form. After starting to send recordings to friends, I quickly became more comfortable speaking for long periods and found it led to more interesting ideas and better understanding of my thoughts and ideas. Plus, it helped me better structure thoughts verbally. I've also started making a recording right after I listen to any podcast. It has made listening to them much more engaging.
I was also surprised by how energizing recording audio is. I find myself refreshed after going for a walk and recording my thoughts, or creating a recording for a friend (much more so than if I listened to a podcast on the same walk, or just walked in silence). It's also a fantastic way to make time in the car creative and productive.
Voice recording or self talking is definitely an underutilized tool for thought and creation.
I don't employ speaking out loud in my own methods, but I do scrawl extensive notes. I can't think straight if I can't take notes with pencil and paper. Whenever a non-trivial problem arises I always break out the paper. I wonder if it's a similar mechanism.
"First you communicate with yourself." - Peter Drucker
I remember Drucker laying out this hierarchy for communication in his tome on management. Each step is progressively harder. Something that made sense in your head, you might not be able to articulate on paper. Something you just wrote may not communicate to someone else.
IME, it is spot on.
"He measured out his long poetic lines by walking back and forth, and if [his wife] Una didn’t hear him pacing, she rapped on the ceiling with a broom.”
:)
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/bright-power-dark-peace-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_...
For me, "thinking" is more like submitting a request to the subconscious and waiting for a response. Not much happens in the brain's "foreground"--or at least it feels that way.
Bullet train driver method for continuing precision. Verbalize, gesticulate, act.
Maybe. Speech does make an idea more concrete. But is the spoken formulation of an idea persistent enough that you can examine it closely from multiple angles and depths to fully assess its validity? Even the written word often lacks the precision needed to ensure that the necessity, sufficiency, and incontrovertibility of an idea has been addressed in full. An idea spoken aloud is but writ on the wind.
When talking to myself, I often find I'm focusing on the best single view on my pet notion, embellishing its strengths rather than demerits. I need the means to formulate a more tangible formula, like a written bulleted list of plusses and minuses. Only then am I likely to reveal and redress the chinks in my idea's armor. And speaking to myself aloud won't do that.
I found that writing has the same effect for me, that is why I use journaling for dealing with complex situations in life. It forces you to materialise what is in your head the same why that speech does, and I find it almost meditative as well.
Currently in my 40's, if that matters, I find it extremely hard to force the language processing part of my brain being turned off, while my ears are listening to spoken words and alerting me constantly about their meaning. It kicks me instantly out of my own context.
Had to quit my most recent job because vast majority of colleagues were talking to themselves loudly while solving their own assignments, and interrupting me from coding sessions too frequently to even enter into the flow. Even noise cancelling headphones I had at the time didn't help.
Therefore to me, not taking colleagues into account while having loud monologues I consider being either ignorant, low EQ, or simply rude.
Nothing wrong with having a little external monologue.
It really is amazing the clarifying effect it can have. We think we have a good idea of what some concept entails, but once we speak it (or write it down), it finally starts to take a more defined "shape".
I don't vocalize but other than that I talk to myself a lot and sometimes also simulate my interlocutor. For example I might be testing ways to defend my argument, asking/answering questions, etc.
Countless times I was stuck in something and decided to open an issue or add a question to stack overflow.
When I interact "formally" with the community like this, I do my proper diligence and try to add as much detail and context as possible. That's the least I can do for someone that will try to help me.
While I'm adding this context, my assumptions, what went wrong, what I've tried and so forth, I often notice I solve the issue on my own!
I'd say more than half of the times I act to open an issue or ask a question, I figure out the issue myself midway.
I guess talking to oneself out loud and writing question-reports are a variation of the rubber duck method.
It is annoying though when websites show a custom "pop-up" to the selection, usually to share the "quote" at Twitter. I think Medium used to do it, not sure if it still does since I always switch to reader mode when I'm there for this very reason.