Talking To Yourself Is Not True Sign Of Approaching Madness

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 88, 28 August 1950, Page 3

Talking To Yourself Is Not True Sign Of Approaching Madness

Talking to-yourself is not necessarily a sign of approaching madness. Most of us do at least a part of our thinking aloud. An English professor, struck by the number of people in city streets who appeared to be nattering to themselves, has since looked out for signs of it in other noisy places and found plenty. Factories, power stations and the like, abound with mumblers sane enough to remark, “you can’t hear yourself think in this place.” Some people think in mental pictures with their mind’s eye as it were, others imagine mainly in terms of sound, but as all of us use language symbols to organise and express our thoughts, we have to do a great deal of our thinking in terms of language, or speech, the professor explains in the Listener. If we all thought aloud we would get in each other’s way, so the civilised convention is that we do not.

Record Movements If you arrange to record the movements of the muscles of the larynx by putting electrodes on someone’s throat, he says, and then ask them to think out answers to questions or give them mental arithmetic to do, it is quite easy to show that while the problem is being solved the muscles are moving and speech is beijng formed—noiseless ' “’subvocal speech” it is called.

We all like the sound of our own Voice and if we cannot find an audience we often make one, but outside mental hospitals we mostly stick to the rules and talk to dogs, cats and ourselves if we think no one is about. The mental patient takes refuge in a world of his own and his thoughts, quite undisciplined and made up of fragmentai’y ideas that flit in and out of his mind, are spoken because he has lost sight of the rules that enable us to live together without getting on each other’s nerves.