Some years ago, I took a call at my desk in the newsroom from a woman with a news tip. The details of the tip escape me now, but her explanation stayed. She wanted us to understand why she was calling, because the situation suggested she’d been living a lie and she was making big changes. She told me that she had a growing interior life and she asked, didn’t we all? Yet her husband could not grasp the concept.

Although she made no reference to Christianity when we talked, this concept of an interior life has roots there. The idea is to have an ongoing conversation with God. By focusing on a friendly, internal exchange with your Creator, you can transform your actions into good works. The faithful call it “prayer.”

If you think about that for a minute, the word prayer can provide a powerful cover to these internal dialogues, especially when spoken aloud. (As does reading and writing, for that matter.) We need that cover because society tends to scorn (or worse) people who talk to themselves.

Now, science has discovered that it may be objectively helpful to talk to yourself. In the Wolfe house, we’ve tolerated thinking out loud. Over the years, we’ve learned to tolerate a range of human behaviors that we didn’t understand at first. Autism has often revealed our ignorance of behavior that is actually beneficial. So, we made room for the possibility that having conversations with yourself could be beneficial. To be sure, these internal-but-out-loud dialogues occur out of earshot of each other, although I still tend to direct my commentary to the dog, as long as I’m not confusing him.

The idea is that there could be wisdom in your “inner crowd.” There’s plenty of research into the wisdom of actual crowds. That research shows that when compiling diverse and independent opinions, they tend to average out, minimizing mistakes and revealing the truth. So, it doesn’t quite make sense that talking to yourself is going to expand your knowledge or change the internal biases that lead to mistakes.

However, some recent studies found that people can get closer to a good answer when they take another’s perspective. Researchers asked participants a factual question (such as the size or count of a thing), asking first for their own answer and then for an answer of someone who would disagree with them. In another study, researchers had participants outfitted for a virtual reality experience, one that contained an avatar of themselves and another Freud-looking avatar. The researchers prompted the participants to voice both avatars in a problem-solving conversation. They discovered that people were able to give themselves good advice.

The outcome reminded me of the power of social stories when Sam was a kid. The stories spelled out the social cues he otherwise missed. He always knew what the “answer” was. In other words, this idea may not be grounded in the principle of crowd-sourcing information at all. I think the idea is to create space. Talk out loud and you give yourself room to think and for all that inner wisdom to break through.

Here’s a couple resources to get you started talking to yourself:

Alter, Adam. (2023) Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When it Matters Most. New York: Simon and Schuster.

https://behavioralscientist.org/tap-into-the-wisdom-of-your-inner-crowd/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9984468/pdf/41598_2023_Article_30599.pdf