Walking in circles within the house and talking to myself out loud: I do this all the time, especially when I need to figure out a particularly hard problem (an algorithm to solve a particular issue, an architecture that handles my business needs etc).
Last time I started a new project and worked on its architecture, I walked over 10km in a single day, according to my cellphone pedometer. In a tiny apartment! This trend lasted for a month, after which I sat down to actually implement this.
I thought it was just me being autistic but it's interesting to know others do it as well :)
I never worked in an office setting, but I can only imagine it would be extremely prejudicial to people like me and the author. Restraining us to a table would limit our output for the sole reason we would be unable to pace and think (no space and too much social pressure).
Anecdata: sometimes I visit my parents and work from their place. I can't pace there because I don't feel comfortable doing so, and that alone is enough for me to not be able to tackle challenging problems there.
Yeah, talking to yourself is usually attributed to being a psycho, but I do this too. In crowdy environments I just do it quietly enough to be perceived as mumbling, as many other people.
I didn’t read tfa, but my guess is that with more senses involved, you get better short term memory coherence. Waiving your hands around the board or looking at pen-paper and drawing also helps. When in doubt, walk. When it is really hard, bathroom.
> talking to yourself is usually attributed to being a psycho
Only if there are voices you hear in return are you considered "psychotic", with psychosis being defined as seeing or hearing things that are not real or attributed to self.
Our thoughts are real and there is nothing wrong with speaking those thoughts out loud any more than making a Youtube video for others to watch later (even yourself).
Agreed, I think it's perfectly normal as long as you don't think you're actually talking to someone (or hearing someone).
I'll pace around talking to myself when prepping for a meeting - it's basically practice for the topics I know we'll be discussing. I even practice responses to what I anticipate their likely responses will be.
It really helps because verbalizing something makes you think more deeply about how to communicate the idea or concept and will sometimes reveal gaps in your understanding or will reveal that you understand it but need to find a good way to concisely convey it to someone else who may not have the same level of expertise.
Why bother, who cares what other people say? The recording thing is not necessarily a bad idea but who has time to go through hours of mumbling? I’d record main ideas and summaries to have them be converted into text and revised. But ultimately the best way to go about this is to write things down either electronically or on paper and use self talking and circular walking as aids to this process
I use Otter[1] for this: I put my Airpods in transparent mode and then record my rambling while I walk my dog. Otter transcribes the whole thing and then I can use the transcription as a rough draft to then rewrite into something concrete.
It's funny, i also walk + talk to myself a ton - and work from home. However, i don't imagine a recording would help much for me. My verbal speech is often half thoughts, ideas expressed in partial to what is running through my mind.
Sometimes i come up with a well phrased final conclusion, but that's more rare i think. Usually it's impossible to follow from the outside.
In my workplace one or two people will poke fun, but it's not a hostile environment and can be taken in good faith, or riposted with some friendly banter.
I’m a pacer too and recently found my daughter seems to have inherited the trait the upshot being that we occasionally collide whilst we pace around the kitchen muttering to ourselves. Hopefully with time we’ll be able to work out collision free routes
I find walking in small circles is even better if you have a tiled floor which can be felt tactilely underfoot. If I ever own a house, the one thing I’ll focus on is kitchen tiling with an interesting pattern.
When I'm on the phone for work, and no one is home, there is a rug in my living room with patters at various angles, just large enough to fit my feet, I tend to move around the rug like I'm following those numbered dance steps you see on the floor in dance classes.
I'm the same as you and I did use to work in an office setting. I'd just go outside and walk around the building. Sometimes I'd walk for an hour aimlessly around the city, just talking to myself like a lunatic.
This is also a fantastic way to do the opposite - bring a book/reader/tablet/phone (and maybe a fruit or snack) and power through some learning materials.
My wife significantly reduced my Home-Office productivity by forbidding me to walk around while calling or designing things. She has problems concentrating when I do it so I understand, it's a major reason to move to a larger house next month.
Your comment and this article brings me great joy. I do the same, I walk in circles even in tiny spaces. I like to put notebook and a pen on a table and sketch my thought process.
At home, this earned me the nickname "satellite". I felt uncomfortably self aware when I just moved in with my partner. Fortunately she finds it soothing.
My first programming job was building tools to make some warehouse work more efficient. At the outset I had most of the warehouse to myself and I walked around the warehouse talking out loud to myself to solve my programming problems. Once the warehouse was populated with workers and I was stuck to my desk I realized how much I needed that walking. Now that I'm working from home I do laps around my kitchen while solving tough problems.
The method works. The only open question is clockwise or counter-clockwise?
[p.s. I've gotten good result with elongated ovals too, btw. The main feature seems to be that the body is "going back to where one started". This seems to help the thinking process.]
My current apartment's topology is such that I can make 8's in it (while thinking of course). I'd never think a simple change in topology can make your thought process a little bit more interesting.
Walking absolutely helps and I do that a lot whenever I have a chance i.e. alone, but I'm not sure about talking out loud. In my mind an architectural/software problem is a structural thing, or a puzzle you need to put together mentally. Talking would only distract me from solving it.
I'm the exact same, although unlike some others, I only talk to myself when I'm alone or with someone who I am comfortable with. I've gotten complaints from neighbors below me at least twice due to this. Apparently it sounds like "a loud TV is on all the time". It would suck to live underneath someone who paces 5 miles a day in their apartment. I've made an effort to be quieter, but I can't imagine not being able to do this. I started recording my thoughts on my phone (using low quality because I have hundreds of hours of recordings now). It really helps and is an alternative to using a journal.
All my complex architectures and systems were also conceived while pacing, so I hear you, but I never considered walking in circles in a room.
Now I'm curious – is that better than walking outside? Why not walk in nature or a park?
I understand not wanting to walk in a dangerous / unknown area (the pace regime implies full autopilot), but a tiny apartment sounds extreme. And isn't the proximity of external tools – like a computer – distracting to your thought process?
This is the same for me barring the walking. Usually I'm at my best focus in front of a whiteboard and talking to myself out loud, because walking distracts me. I work in a busy office where there's a lot of noise (which I'm sensitive to) and where I can't speak to myself loudly, so I feel I'm not very productive. Teleworking has been awesome
I do this too, infact I built a walking desk to just assist this habit of mine, so that I can think while looking at my screen and then also walk at the same time. I have been using it for the past couple of days, and till now tbh it doesn't really feel the same as it does with walking around the room but I'm slowly getting used to it, and my knee pain from sitting is gone
To solve a problem, we need to be smarter than the problem - or the problem needs to be dumber than us.
When vocalizing something, you're forced to constrict the blob of complexity you're carrying in your head into a linear narrative, which is by definition simpler. Now that you have simplified the problem you are more likely to get hold of it and solve it.
This happens all the time - when I am solving a technical/logical problem, sometimes I feel like my wife thinks I am just staring blankly at the screen day-dreaming. So I get insecure and start to explain to her how hard the problem is, but because she's a physician I have to translate it into common language first, and 99% of the time I say "never mind, got it" before I have a chance to really bore her.
Come to think of it, this may be how therapy works. You are forced to take all the "mess" that's in your head and narrate it to someone else, in the process getting much simpler perspective on it.
Writing is the same way for me. For example, all the ideas in this post were in my head in some amorphous way, but now that I wrote them out they became neat little analogies I can use in the future.
> Come to think of it, this may be how therapy works. You are forced to take all the "mess" that's in your head and narrate it to someone else, in the process getting much simpler perspective on it.
On a related note: some people close to me like to unload the contents of their head at me. I couldn't understand why - I initially assumed this was a kind of "I need someone to emphasize with me and validate my feelings" thing. Hearing roughly similar thoughts about the same issue for the fifth time in a month got particularly tiresome, and I struggled to understand why these people are doing it. Until one day I looked at the evening "mind dumps" I take in my .org mode file, and it hit me: it's the same thing. It has the same cadence, and same tendency to jump back and forth between related topics. Much like I sort through my thoughts by writing them down in solitude, these people are sorting through their thoughts by talking at me. All that time, I've just been a rubber duck.
That is to say: I think not only this may be how therapy works, I think many (most?) people do this in social context - perhaps being afraid or unacustommed to talking to themselves, or to writing thoughts down (one needs to be a fast typist to write at the speed of thought, which is perhaps why this kind of sorting your thoughts through writing isn't as popular as through talking).
One advantage of talking to someone instead of writing is that they will perk up and catch anything wrong or suspicious you say. This could be as simple as a factual inaccuracy, or as subtle as an emotional misapprehension. Of course, you need people in your life who can deal with hearing something wrong in a fruitful way for this to work - but if you have them, it's a very valuable benefit.
> That is to say: I think not only this may be how therapy works, I think many (most?) people do this in social context - perhaps being afraid or unacustommed to talking to themselves, or to writing thoughts down
I agree with that. I see my wife maintain her perspective by talking through with friends and family first. I do the same by writing.
This may have downsides, especially with first simple words that come to mind (like in “everything is X” or “this is <adjective>”). Words turn ideas into a network of associative meanings that already exist and may fix them in stone once you get used to it. This happened to me many times so I got a habit of asking a lot of questions first rather than verbalizing ideas asap, and then using handmade verbs/adjs/nouns to describe thin differences.
As a russian classic said, feelings and emotions turned into words lose their power. Like a deep overwhelming emotion if analyzed and verbalized may turn into “I like her feet” if you didn’t use/know approriate terms or concepts before.
Right - but no risk of that here because:
1. You've already struggled with the amorphity by the time you vocalized it. So you're not missing it.
2. If you over-simplify it, you'll just not find a solution, so you know.
I think this is partly why Rubber Duck Debugging[1] can sometimes work, especially if you're vocalising the steps. I've often started typing a question on Stackoverflow when suddenly I solved the issue just by the act of verbalising the question as I type.
I've found this to also help when I'm doing any sort of creative work or brainstorming, simply talking and explaining as if I'm presenting to an audience helps me generate ideas. Never spoken out loud to myself in public though...
the shift from a asynchronous communications (email) to real-time chat (slack/teams) may have led to a significant reduction in "thinking things through"
Writing an email or a SO question has a pretty significant upfront investment and requires clearer articulation, whereas real-time chat seems to lead to shallow enquiry.
In other words with real-time chat, the recipient has become the rubber duck.
Absolutely. I don't personally use a rubber duck when alone but we call it that in the team when you just wave someone over to your desk to talk something over (and now virtually in a quick call).
I personally have always liked writing down my "conclusions" so far into an evolving comment on a defect/bug ticket, which I only actually submit at the end when I've found the real issue. In the end you have a nice explanation of what exactly and why it went wrong and it helps with the actual debugging/thinking it through. And it also helps with the inevitable comments/questions in the PR when people wonder why the hell you are making the change you're making and you have something refer back to.
I imagine one hack for overcoming social anxiety for doing this in public is to put in some airpods or something else that indicates you’re on a phone call. Most people will assume you’re on a phone call and won’t really care.
For myself I do this constantly. Have done it my whole life. I think some people are impressed by my public speaking abilities, how I can often come up with pretty persuasive blurbs on the spot. But I think it’s not impressive at all because I’ve spent so much of my life talking to myself.
I have a hunch a lot of really good comedians and voice actors spend a fair amount of time talking to themselves. I can do a handful of pretty spot on accents. The key? Being a weirdo and messing around with talking to myself in accents frequently.
Sometimes when I get frustrated with some particularly troublesome code while working alone I'll drop into a thick english cockney accent (or at least my best impression) and start trash-talking the code to vent my frustrations. It's pretty cathartic and puts me in a better and slightly humourous mood... better than bottling it up!
An old magazine article about the actor Matthew McConaughey (maybe in the NYT?) mentioned that he carries a tape recorder in his car and talks to it on long drives.
Interestingly enough he's recently written an autobiography, which he says sprang from his habit of keeping diaries. He says he's kept diaries for 36 years.
A "learn by talking" and "learn by writing" person, surely.
I recently began to read out loud for my newborn. Currently, she doesn't understand what I'm saying. Therefore, I can read whatever I want. Sometimes, I read her technical or scientific articles, adult-level books, etc.
I read in a "parentese" style with pauses, higher pitch, and drawn out vowels. I found that I was understanding the material better when I did that. It's not efficient because my reading speed slows down. But just the act of read out loud helped in retaining information.
Doing things out loud could be some sort of "life-hack" to help learn or problem solve.
Uh, while it's true that the child doesn't understand at first... Please be aware that it also needs simple words that keep getting used in order to actually learn the language.
I'm sure you're doing everything correct and have more then enough dialog with the child, but your phrasing made it sound like it doesn't matter what you read. It definitely does.
My pediatrician said I can read anything to her at her current age (under 3 months).
From my research, yes, it does matter what you read to the child, but it depends on the age. For someone like my daughter's age, the interaction and pitch is more important than what's being read.
Presumably, at the earliest stages of language acquisition, the brain is learning to group similar sounds into phonemes. The brain performs a clustering operation on sounds, and needs to learn in a language-dependent way which variations in sounds need to be ignored and which variations are important. For instance, many Japanese and Koreans have a hard time distinguishing between R and L because the range of sounds in English are a single phoneme in Japanese and Korean. Similarly. Apparently also the closest phoneme in Korean to English's F roughly covers the space of both P and F in English, leading to "Waffle" being pronounced as "wapple". I'm a native English speaker and it took a while to un-train my brain to filter out differences in tone in Mandarin and Thai. Thai also has a sound somewhere between T and D that I had always heard as T, until my wife was horrified that I was pronouncing the name of a king as the name of a controversial politician. My Thai wife has a lot of trouble hearing the difference between CH and SH. I remember seeing a public television show where they tested the ability of children to distinguish between two phonemes in Navajo that sound identical to most English speakers. Beyond a fairly young age, it took longer than the duration of the experiment (I presume several hours) for children to learn to distinguish between the two Navajo phonemes.
I'm not a developmental psychologist, but it seems like early on, you're just throwing phonemes at the child to allow them to learn to cluster the sounds so that later stages in language processing don't have to deal with as much noise and variation. I suspect that as long as you're not switching up the phoneme rules on your kid (T/TD/D vs T/D, R/L vs L, tonal vs. non-tonal, etc.), the actual words used early on don't matter.
Again, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but my guess is that before the brain gets phoneme clustering down, there's too much noise and irrelevant detail being passed along to later processing stages for the brain to make much progress in learning higher-level details of language.
If we know reading simple stuff works, but reading scientific papers a child can't possibly understand only might be OK, then why would you do the latter?
For me I read the complex stuff because 1) math papers do put her to sleep, and 2) then I get time to read math papers.
The kid will be fine. It's not as if you won't have conversations with simple words as well. Is my kid gonna understand that Neruda poem about an onion, either? No, but she's developing an ear for poetry, consonance, assonance, rhyme. And she won't be afraid of the word "eigenvector". I grew up with parents who did not know the word "eigenvector" and had friends whose grad student parents could correct their multivariable calculus homework before it got turned in (so she always got perfect scores). We both turned out fine.
Talking to oneself as a technology though does get harder when you get a lot of, "What, mommy?" in response....
I do this all the time, but mostly outside. A nice bonus of doing this outside (besides the fresh air, etc) is you can often recall precisely where you were and what was on your visual field (since it's constantly changing unlike at home) when you had a particular thought, so you can refer to to it later as "that thought I had when I was approaching that icecream truck in Red Hook".
If you are self-conscious like I was when I first started doing this, it helps to put on some kind of headphone, if only to put yourself at peace by the thought "they'll just think I'm talking on the phone".
When I have a good thought, I record it on my phone (or dictate it into Gboard, which works offline) and later upload the mp3 to an app called Otter, which gives extremely good transcription and allow me to search through years' worth of voice notes by text but also be able to instantly hear myself talking from 2 years' ago, which I find to be much more effective for resuming a train of thought than looking at typed notes.
I am a big fan of something similar, if less visible: writing as I work. For each project, I keep an Evernote [1] note. If I ever need to think something through, I'll add a new, dated entry at the top and just describe what I'm doing and considering.
This is sometimes useful to refer back to. E.g., to find a specific command, or to remember the factors behind a choice. But honestly, most of the value is that it requires me to linearize and structure my thinking. The advantage to me over self-speech is that I can put something down and pick it up again later. If I take a break and reread an entry, I come at it with a little distance that helps me see things I was missing before.
I do that too - particularly when dealing with tough problems.
I used to keep an org-mode file for every project I was working on, in which I'd brainstorm ongoing issues, but over time, these notes started to leak into my general "daily notes", so my current pattern is: both at work and at home, I keep a YYYY-MM.org (e.g. 2020-12.org) file where I make daily headings and write to myself.
The resulting notes are mostly write-only - they're verbose, and usually take too much effort to read through (unless I anticipate the need for future reference and write a summary on purpose). But all of the benefit comes from the very act of writing - it does wonders for structuring my thoughts, and I find it much better than talking to myself (which I used to do a lot when I was younger). My screen has more space than my working memory, so when doing written notes, my thinking process does much less backtracking.
I do this. It’s fascinating how most numbers seem to have a (subjective) pattern of some kind; I wouldn’t have thought so many 2- and 3-digit numbers have some meaning to me!
I now always announce out loud when I've taken my medication for the day. For some reason it's just easier to remember when you say stuff out loud versus just thinking it.
I was inspired by the success of "point and call" from the Tokyo train system.
I have a tendency to lock the door when I leave the apartment, go down a flight of stairs, and then go back up to check if I really locked the door. Saying "I've locked the door" to myself in my head explicitly helps with this.
I wish I could post this anonymously but I talk to myself during periods of intense problem solving and meditation. I maybe the only one that can answer technical problems I'm having sometimes with my own faults being the cause. Without a thorough review, tracing back probing to their source I'd be unable to continue with complex and obscure problems. In short only I have the answers to my problems as many problems are self caused. I use self speech as a way of forcing my brain to put vague notions into words so they can become more like reason and easier to pursue or reject.
I grew up alone, I had no one to talk to about things which are interesting to me.
I also sometimes have pressured speech, a psychological problem of an unknown origin. But treatment keeps it in check. I have just learned to censor myself when around others.
I like to mouth words out to myself to help me think instead of talking out loud.
While this is normally perfectly fine during in-person exams, this year I've gotten warned for looking suspicious because through video surveillance it looks like I'm reading something out for somebody else in the room during exams.
Because it's so ingrained in me, I now concentrate on remembering to not mouth anything rather than on the test itself.
I had the exact thing happen to me (pre—pandemic). I complained pretty extensively to the test sponsor and the proctoring organization, as that (and a few other "rules") weren't written down anywhere.
I didn't get anywhere but I'd still encourage you to do the same. If no one explains the problems with these tests to the people paying for them (the teachers, department chairs and employers) than they wont know what's going on either.
Life pro tip, if you don't want to be seen as a "crazy" person, slap on a pair of headphones and activate your phones voice recorder. You can pretend to be on a phone call, record your thoughts, and no-one will be any of the wiser.
It is impressive how people reinvent the well in all human fields. This is the basis of a lot of the research of soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), as in his classic book "Thought and Language".
I always speak to my confident, which is my wife. I bounce ideas and problems to her. she is in the same field as mine. so she will just listen and no response. But somehow my mind gets cleared up and I see through the problem. I dont do self-talk. In longer run it seems to be counter productive. Having a good friend or confident will be more powerful is my thought
In many ways this seems to have replaced diaries as a way of organizing your thoughts prior to screaming them into the void, with the bonus of spam and random racist diatribes.
Same here. I often find myself writing similar things under similar topics, but the very act of writing a comment makes me refine my beliefs just a bit.
(And then I can always count on other people to call me on my bullshit, which is another learning opportunity.)
I recently started sending long form voice recordings to friends as a new way to stay connected (I explain that idea here https://nicktorba.com/brain/voice-memo-experiment). I'm excited to send those friends a link to this article as a way to further convince them they should send recordings back.
I did not expect the personal thought benefits that come from speaking to yourself in long form. After starting to send recordings to friends, I quickly became more comfortable speaking for long periods and found it led to more interesting ideas and better understanding of my thoughts and ideas. Plus, it helped me better structure thoughts verbally. I've also started making a recording right after I listen to any podcast. It has made listening to them much more engaging.
I was also surprised by how energizing recording audio is. I find myself refreshed after going for a walk and recording my thoughts, or creating a recording for a friend (much more so than if I listened to a podcast on the same walk, or just walked in silence). It's also a fantastic way to make time in the car creative and productive.
Voice recording or self talking is definitely an underutilized tool for thought and creation.
I reckon in a large city you could get away with this without even any weird looks. People might think you're on the phone or they might think you're crazy. Either way they won't give it a second thought.
I don't employ speaking out loud in my own methods, but I do scrawl extensive notes. I can't think straight if I can't take notes with pencil and paper. Whenever a non-trivial problem arises I always break out the paper. I wonder if it's a similar mechanism.
In your head > out loud > on paper > to someone else.
"First you communicate with yourself." - Peter Drucker
I remember Drucker laying out this hierarchy for communication in his tome on management. Each step is progressively harder. Something that made sense in your head, you might not be able to articulate on paper. Something you just wrote may not communicate to someone else.
I'm not talking about writing, though. Writing is certainly harder than talking. But I'm talking about scrawling notes. Drawing pictures of data structures, abstract flow diagrams etc. It's not for reading. It's not even something I'll read again later, although it can be something I use again and again while I'm working on it.
The poet Robinson Jeffers also did this. He'd walk around in circles composing his poetry. If he stopped...
"He measured out his long poetic lines by walking back and forth, and if [his wife] Una didn’t hear him pacing, she rapped on the ceiling with a broom.”
I suspect talking out loud could have even greater benefits for people with little or no internal monologue [1]. Would be curious to hear if anyone has first-hand experience.
I'd be curious to know as well. I'm someone who doesn't have an internal monologue or the ability to visualize images (I can hardly comprehend what that would even feel like), but I've never felt the need to talk to myself to think through something. I'm not sure I'd even know what to say.
For me, "thinking" is more like submitting a request to the subconscious and waiting for a response. Not much happens in the brain's "foreground"--or at least it feels that way.
> Speech is not merely a conduit for the transmission of ideas, [...] but a generative activity that enhances thinking.
Maybe. Speech does make an idea more concrete. But is the spoken formulation of an idea persistent enough that you can examine it closely from multiple angles and depths to fully assess its validity? Even the written word often lacks the precision needed to ensure that the necessity, sufficiency, and incontrovertibility of an idea has been addressed in full. An idea spoken aloud is but writ on the wind.
When talking to myself, I often find I'm focusing on the best single view on my pet notion, embellishing its strengths rather than demerits. I need the means to formulate a more tangible formula, like a written bulleted list of plusses and minuses. Only then am I likely to reveal and redress the chinks in my idea's armor. And speaking to myself aloud won't do that.
> it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.
I found that writing has the same effect for me, that is why I use journaling for dealing with complex situations in life. It forces you to materialise what is in your head the same why that speech does, and I find it almost meditative as well.
Seems I'm an outlier. Never do this and it irritates me if others in the same room do this. On the other hand my silent thinking is sometimes disturbing to whose around me - so I was told.
Currently in my 40's, if that matters, I find it extremely hard to force the language processing part of my brain being turned off, while my ears are listening to spoken words and alerting me constantly about their meaning. It kicks me instantly out of my own context.
Had to quit my most recent job because vast majority of colleagues were talking to themselves loudly while solving their own assignments, and interrupting me from coding sessions too frequently to even enter into the flow. Even noise cancelling headphones I had at the time didn't help.
Therefore to me, not taking colleagues into account while having loud monologues I consider being either ignorant, low EQ, or simply rude.
Im more vague when I mumble talk outloud and to me the advantage to writing things down is that I don’t have to slow down the thinking process but aid it and let it keep the momentum going. Sometimes I can utter a random name to point down a metaphor that is still too raw to describe by writing it down, other times I’d use talking outloud to gain a few more registers to store a few mental items. I sometimes reason better on paper and other times the more vague approach helps better.
I’ll sit there staring at the wall for minutes at a time just running through narrative in my head. It’s a bit difficult to keep it on track sometimes, but with some concentration I can pull the reins back to keep focus. It probably looks like I am “doing nothing” but hey it works for me! I’ve never really tried verbalizing to myself, but I’ve effectively gotten over problems by rubber ducking with a peer, makes sense that it would work talking to myself as well :)
Whenever I have a personal epiphany, I tend to record a quick vocal note of it. Recently I've been kind of thinking you should only get involved with people who are going to add to your equation. For example last year I had the pleasure of knowing someone who made around 200k. Within a year of meeting her I was also making 200k. compared to getting involved with someone who doesn't have a job, and therefore your life turns into chaos.
I am my own interlocutor. I ask myself questions and answer in-kind. Sometimes the exchange borders on adversarial. This is how I know what I know and what I don't know. This is how I discover answers and formulate better questions. It's all done in a mere whisper and with muted gestures so as to not scare infants or livestock. I have been this way all my life...
I'm learning how to write mathematical proofs now, and just today I wrote in my notes: "talk things through out loud".
It really is amazing the clarifying effect it can have. We think we have a good idea of what some concept entails, but once we speak it (or write it down), it finally starts to take a more defined "shape".
My hunch is that part of the efficacy of pair programming is down to the fact that it legitimises speaking your thoughts out loud as you code, bringing your assumptions and process to your own attention. (As well as the other more oft-related benefits of having someone else available to vet & supplement those things)
I find myself imagining I'm giving a lecture to an audience about the subject or problem I'm studying. It gives me a new perspective and allows me to condense what I learnt so far. These exercises also helps improving communication with others, typically when I need to explain something.
I found myself talking like the typical man voice in a National Geographic documentary, describing what I need to think about like they describe some geological processes. Very useful thought process!
Speaking from experience, I highly recommend writing to yourself as well. Use a plain text editor and Markdown. Ask yourself questions. Leave half formed ideas in the air and come back to them later. Make a whole folder full of markdown notes for your different projects.
Does getting into verbal arguments with myself count or do I need to seek help?
I don't vocalize but other than that I talk to myself a lot and sometimes also simulate my interlocutor. For example I might be testing ways to defend my argument, asking/answering questions, etc.
I have realised this works really well when I am unable to focus, especially when feeling sleepy. Talking and thereby listening to myself helps me reconsolidate my thoughts and I think we are better at listening to an external voice than to an internal rumbling.
For me it helps with organizing an approach or schedule, but for bigger issues I use THC and a long walk outdoors. This lets me get outside myself and visualize the problem from new angles and big and small scale.
This is my absolute favorite way to spend an evening. Wandering around the neighborhood with a THC vape pen thinking about a problem. Helps me get in about 5 miles of walking every evening too.
Countless times I was stuck in something and decided to open an issue or add a question to stack overflow.
When I interact "formally" with the community like this, I do my proper diligence and try to add as much detail and context as possible. That's the least I can do for someone that will try to help me.
While I'm adding this context, my assumptions, what went wrong, what I've tried and so forth, I often notice I solve the issue on my own!
I'd say more than half of the times I act to open an issue or ask a question, I figure out the issue myself midway.
I guess talking to oneself out loud and writing question-reports are a variation of the rubber duck method.
Yeah. Most of my comments are half-baked thoughts. Many of them I delete before submitting as writing it out makes me realise I haven't thought it through enough even for a comment.
When I see that someone wants to talk to me and is about to distract me while coding, I start narrating my technical thoughts out loud and then they leave me alone.
I constantly highlight text as I'm reading, clicking constantly. No doubt the heatmaps of my journeys through websites leave an interesting impression.
It is annoying though when websites show a custom "pop-up" to the selection, usually to share the "quote" at Twitter. I think Medium used to do it, not sure if it still does since I always switch to reader mode when I'm there for this very reason.
Last time I started a new project and worked on its architecture, I walked over 10km in a single day, according to my cellphone pedometer. In a tiny apartment! This trend lasted for a month, after which I sat down to actually implement this.
I thought it was just me being autistic but it's interesting to know others do it as well :)
I never worked in an office setting, but I can only imagine it would be extremely prejudicial to people like me and the author. Restraining us to a table would limit our output for the sole reason we would be unable to pace and think (no space and too much social pressure).
Anecdata: sometimes I visit my parents and work from their place. I can't pace there because I don't feel comfortable doing so, and that alone is enough for me to not be able to tackle challenging problems there.