Talking to yourself does not mean that you are insane, but can actually benefit the process of thinking and understanding, the researchers said.

People often talk to themselves, most of them do so at least every few days, and many of them talk to themselves every hour, according to scientists.

Although this may seem illogical, previous research has shown that talking to oneself can help guide children's behavior. Children often tell themselves step by step about tasks such as lace, as if to remind themselves to focus on What is in their hands.

To see if talking to oneself can also help adults, psychologists have experimented with volunteers who must look for specific things. This work was partly inspired by the researcher himself.

"I often talk to myself when I search for something in the refrigerator or on the supermarket shelves," says Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In one experiment, 20 pictures of different things were presented to volunteers and asked them to look for something specific, such as bananas. In half of the experiment, some participants were asked to say what they were looking for aloud and asked others to remain silent.

The researchers found that talking to self helped people find things faster by 50 to 100 milliseconds per second.

(The average time it took for participants to find an element was 1.2 to 2 seconds).

"The point is that language is not just a communication system, but I argue that it can increase cognition and enhanced thinking," says Lubian.

In another experiment, volunteers undertook a virtual shopping mission where they saw images of items usually on supermarket shelves and asked them to find a particular item, such as Jell-O candy, as soon as possible. The results were more complicated - there was an advantage to speaking only when you were familiar to volunteers - for example, saying (cola) helped when looking for cola, but saying "speed stick" , As the brand (Speed ​​Stick) is not a world-famous brand.

"Talking to yourself is not always useful - if you do not really know what the body looks like, saying that saying it will have no effect but may slow you down. On the other hand, you know that the bananas are yellow and have a certain shape, Bananas, you do these visual properties in your brain to help you find them. "

"In the future, the brain can be examined at the same time as these tests, to see what brain circuits are involved," he said.

Lubian and his colleague Daniel Swingley listed their findings on the Internet on April 10 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.