Talking to Yourself Makes You Smarter


The research, carried out by Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley, was inspired the pair's experiences of seeing people audibly muttering to themselves when trying to find items on supermarket shelves. To test whether speaking to oneself was actually beneficial, Lupyan and Swingley devised a set of experiments.



In a second experiment, the volunteers were made to perform a virtual shopping task. Here, they were presented with a wide range of objects typically found in a supermarket, and asked to locate a particular item. Again, they performed this task in silence and whilst talking to themselves. Again, when participants spoke to themselves they found the object more quickly—but only when they were familiar with the name. So, repeating the word "coke" helps you zero-in cola, but muttering "RIM PlayBook" if you've never heard of one—and who has?—won't help you find one any quicker. The results are published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.


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