Psychology suggests talking to yourself out loud may measurably improve cognitive performance and for people who are prone to it, stopping hinders them

I don’t know about you, but when I’m working through something difficult — navigating a new place, trying to remember which platform my train leaves from, talking myself through a recipe I’ve made twice before but somehow still can’t trust — I tend to narrate out loud. Not to anyone. Just to myself. I do it walking through IKEA. I do it loading the dishwasher. My wife has, gently, asked more than once whether I’m okay.

I’ve long assumed this was a mild personal quirk, probably more embarrassing than useful. Recent research suggests I’ve been underestimating it.

A 2023 study by Xinqi Guo and Karen Dobkins at UC San Diego, set out to test whether talking out loud to yourself (what researchers call “private speech”) actually improves cognitive performance in adults. 

The study worked like this. 103 participants completed a visual-spatial working memory task — a card-matching game in which hidden pairs of images had to be found and remembered across an array of cards. In one condition, participants were told to stay silent. In the other, they were told to talk out loud to themselves as much as possible. Fewer turns to complete the game meant better memory performance. The order of the two conditions was counterbalanced so that practice effects couldn’t explain any difference between them.

The headline results were straightforward. Participants performed significantly better in the private speech condition than in the quiet one. Within a person across two trials, more private speech also predicted better performance — the more someone talked out loud, the better they tended to do. The researchers also varied difficulty by using images that were either easy or hard to label, and the benefit held across both levels: talking helped whether the task felt manageable or demanding.

The finding I keep coming back to, though, is buried a little deeper. The participants who reported using more self-management private speech in everyday life — the people who, like me, mutter their way through tasks — showed the greatest benefit when they were allowed to talk. 

For habitual self-talkers, silence during a cognitively demanding task may not be a neutral baseline. It might be an active constraint that interferes with how they normally process information. The instruction to “keep quiet” — unremarkable for one person — could, for another, be the equivalent of asking them to do the task with one hand tied behind their back. I’m overstating this slightly to make the point. The study doesn’t isolate a clean penalty for being silenced; what it shows is that the people who naturally talk benefit most when they’re allowed to.

The researchers propose several possible mechanisms for why talking out loud helps. One is attention: narrating a task may focus cognitive resources on what actually matters, reducing the chance of getting distracted. A second is that you create an auditory memory trace on top of the visual one — two channels instead of one. A third is that the act of labeling something out loud makes it more meaningful, which activates related long-term memories and effectively expands working memory capacity.

I find the second one most intuitively true. When someone tells me their name and I want to actually remember it, saying it back to them out loud — not just in my head — fixes it for me in a way silent repetition never quite does. The labeling argument is harder to feel from the inside, but it would explain why I narrate things I obviously already know. Saying “left of the fridge, second shelf” out loud while I’m looking for the soy sauce isn’t telling me anything I haven’t seen with my own eyes. But apparently it might help me find it faster next time.

What I’m willing to take from a single study, without overreading: talking out loud to yourself is a legitimate cognitive tool. Not just a personality trait, not just an embarrassing habit. The effects vary from person to person, and the researchers are careful not to frame the finding as universal. But for the rest of us muttering our way through the supermarket, there appears to be more going on than we thought.

None of which means I’m going to stop apologising the next time my partner catches me in the kitchen narrating my way through dinner. I’m just going to do it slightly less sincerely.

I’m not a psychologist — this is one reader’s take on a single study, not clinical advice. The mechanisms discussed are the ones the researchers propose.