Oop, goofed that one. Of course it decreases the quality of the chatter.
This is my situation with my wife. Plus, she wears hearing aids, and can use the bluetooth function on her hearing aids to talk through her phone, so (1) I’m not sure if she’s talking to herself or me, and (2) I don’t know if she’s talking to herself, me, or on the phone. So (3) I ignore her, assuming she’s either talking to herself or on the phone unless she says it louder, making it clear she’s talking to me.
Now I rarely talk to myself out loud unless I’m writing, and will read it out loud to figure out how it sounds.
Except I do talk to myself out loud when I’m driving, so I can loudly call other drivers idiots and morons (which they are, of course). From the safety of my enclosed car. I don’t want some armed idiot or moron to pull a gun on me.
I have exactly the same issue. Particularly after retiring from teaching a few years ago, my wife has begun to vocalize things she’s thinking. In particular, while she’s watching television, she makes comments about what she’s seeing on TV, or how she agrees or disagrees with what she’s seeing, out loud.
If I’m in the room, I often have a difficult time grasping if she’s actually trying to engage me in a conversation (made worse by my own poor hearing), or if she’s just speaking her thoughts out loud. She’s fully aware that she’s speaking her thoughts out loud, and just doesn’t care.
There is some belief that not all people have an inner monologue. I don’t know if that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. I have an incessant inner monologue. It can be useful in many ways but it’s also an annoyance. And hardly a monologue, more like a whole cast vying for more lines. Sometimes I have to voice one aloud to be heard over the cacophony. Thus I could say “Shut up and get back to the post” aloud right now. Instead I’ll just click on reply.
I’m still stuck on this.
Mentally ill? Why did you think this? I’m curious.
The following are rhetorical questions which I asked myself. Silently. What about when people sing to themselves, like when they’re doing something physical-- vacuuming or working in the yard? I sing out loud by myself both at home and in the car. Have you never watched little kids talk to themselves, as if telling themselves a story? When I’m writing, I’ll often say a sentence out loud a couple of different ways to see which “sounds” better-- proofreading with my ears.
I can confirm that I definitely don’t. Whatever limited processing is going on in my head I don’t hear it as words at all, let alone a voice of any kind.
When I’m reading words, yes. I hear them in my voice. If I’m rehearsing what I am going to say in a given situation then I purposefully “turn on” the words so I can hear what they sound like.
When I’m purely thinking ad hoc thoughts though, no. I don’t hear words. The concepts just sort of float around and are felt rather than heard.
And I never talk to myself either.
It was a universal trope of 1940s-1980s entertainment that one of the hallmarks of a crazy person is they’d be walking down the street have an agitated conversation with nobody.
To the point that when mobiles and earpieces first became commonplace ~20 years ago, there were lots of ordinary non-showbiz people joking about thinking suddenly the population of crazies had exploded.
The no-kidding wacko issuing an incomprehensible harangue at all and sundry from a street corner is a very common sight wherever homeless are frequently seen.
Not fiction; fact. I dealt with one 8 days ago who wanted to attack my car at a convenience mart for some reason known only to him. No harm done, but he rapidly got wacky enough the local PD hauled him away. Drugs? Insanity? Other mental illness? All three? I have no clue but he was highly agitated and highly verbal.
I always thought those references to “being crazy” were just colloquial things people say, like, “Oh, my mother is driving me crazy!” and not a serious reference to mental illness.
Yeah, a street person waving at the sky and talking out loud… okay, likely some real psychological issues there. Not what I took the OP to mean.
This is fascinating to me. I feel like I have conversation going all the time… making me wonder if the difference is a “left brain” vs “right brain” thing. As I understand, feelings are more right-brain and language is more left. I wonder if there is any way to test which side is dominant in any given person…
At home I am the one who babbles, specially while cooking, but also when daydreaming or when reading a book. I also talk to things in their own language, like saying tshoiiinnng! to the toaster, gurgle! to the espresso machine and so on. I think there is a mild tourette component there, I hope it does not get worse. Very seldom insults.
My wife does not like it. She fears I also do it when other people are present and I don’t notice, and she assumes loud farting is included in this it. Something I vehemently deny.
As others have said, people aren’t “talking to themselves” because that would be redundant. It really is a matter of “thinking out loud”. That’s not just a euphemism, that is what is happening. You are verbalizing your thoughts.
I do it at times because if I hear something out loud, I can make sense of it better. Have you ever heard the expression, “Now that I hear it, I realize how stupid that is”? Sometimes that happens to me, or if I’m trying to plan out a process or solve a problem, hearing the issue helps me figure out what the next steps are.
Another thing, and it’s probably just a trick specific to how my brain works, is that if I hear something I remember it better. Let’s say I need to set something down somewhere unusual, if I verbalize that I’ve set this thing in this spot, give it a moment to crystallize in my brain, and then go on to do what I was going to do, I am far more likely to remember than if I just casually set it down and continued on. It’s a way of making myself pay attention and create a mental snapshot I can use later.
As soon as I figure out why I actually shout things I believe I am only thinking*, I’ll try to figure out why I talk to myself.
I have conversations with the cats, and voice their parts. My wife is a little unnerved when she sees me do this.
*The most recent time I know I did this, it was “I don’t know who the fuck you are, Maurice.” Fortunately, I was saying this to Maurice’s demanding email, not their face. My co-workers sitting around me seemed to find it hilarious.
This is absolutely how it worked for me (when I worked). We had a rotating “Programmer of the Day” who, on their assigned day, did nothing but answer questions/help solve problems on that day. I can’t tell you how many times I made it half way through an explanation of my issue when I’d stop and say: “Oh, I see the problem.” It’s amazing how articulating something makes it clearer.
But I haven’t starting to talking just to myself in public yet. 
One interesting quirk of my mental processing is that music can act as a very powerful memory aid.
e.g. If I’m listening to music whilst doing food shopping then when I hear the same playlist even days later I can remember what I was picking up or looking for at the various points in the songs. My wife rolls her eyes when, on driving down a certain road I can say that it reminds me of “song x” which was playing when we last travelled that way. “you remember weird stuff” is her common response.
“What’s the frequency, Kenneth!?” Indeed.
Usually when I am driving I catch myself talking out loud. Most of the time it has something to do with wishing I had told somebody something I didn’t say. Not something nice a a rule.
I have a nephew who does this. He says whatever comes into his head at the time, even if it’s irrelevant to a conversation. \very annoying.
Another person who talks to myself. Often it’s a running commentary on what I’m either doing or trying to do. Sometimes it serves as a checklist of things that need to be done: “Okay, now that I’ve paid the online bills, what else did I need to do before I break for lunch. Oh, don’t forget that you need to start a load of laundry before lunch, so it’ll be done and you can put it away before dinner.”
It’s not always quite that coherent, but that’s the gist of it. Also, I do things like check to see if I need to refill my drink as long as I’m getting up to do something else - nothing is more annoying than to settle back onto the sofa and then realize that my glass is almost empty. Especially because at my age and the state of my knees getting up again is a minor (and on bad days, major) project.
Of course, since I live alone except for my cat there’s no one to be disturbed by thiis.
The conversation in my head is a useful tool to translate concepts into communicable language. It’s also helpful in the manner described below to somehow cause a solution to come to the fore.
I can use it by starting an internal conversation to evoke details from a vague memory, or just figure out what that word is that’s on the tip of my tongue but can’t quite say.
This is one of the ways I imagined someone with no internal monologue would describe their mental processing. The other possibility was people with no such capability at all, even to rehearse speech or while reading. I’m not sure to what extent that could happen to people.
yes, my approach is not the norm but certainly not particularly rare whereas what you describe above is almost certain to exist but quite how that works I cannot imagine.
There are also people who can’t picture items or people in their heads, equally curious to me. Brains is weird.