You Don't Say!?

I was eating my breakfast and watching the local news yesterday when I heard some good news: a new study says that talking to yourself is good for your brain.

Woot!  Woot! Woot!

What a relief!!!!!!  I'm not alone!!!!!!!

I constantly talk aloud to myself and I think it first started after my son was born.  It didn't matter that he couldn't answer me. I got used to thinking out loud.  While I was in the house taking care of my son as a newborn, and then later as a young child, I would constantly talk to him about what the weather was like, what I heard on television, who I just talked to, what we needed to do next or something that might be going on with him.

Of course, my son is a senior in college now and I still talk to myself all the time so what does that say about me?

What other kinds of conversations do I have with myself, you may ask?  Well, I can honestly say that almost every day I walk into rooms in my house or into places around my office and find myself saying out loud, "Why did I come in  here?"  "What was I looking for?" "I know it's here if I just keep looking." or "Damn, I know it's around here!"

I say other things too about annoying people, but I can't print those sentences here.

In any case, this new study just published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology  concludes that talking to yourself can actually help improve your thinking process and boost your perception of the world around you.

It gets better.

In the first experiment conducted by researchers from the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania, they presented the participants with 20 labels of various objects.  The volunteers were then asked to go and find the particular objects.  Some of them were directed with a label to look for that item and others were directed to look for the item while repeating the name of the item out loud to themselves.

The people who repeated the name of the item out loud were able to find it faster than those who didn't!  There is actual research and evidence showing that it's smart to talk to yourself out loud and I'm not wacky at all for doing it!

Now that I have proof that this self-talk works, I think I'll conduct an experiment myself :  repeatedly saying out loud, "Money."

Let's see what happens!