| > or planning hypothetical conversations with other people It's not that, but it's related to that. It is done in the same manner, with you imagining what the other person would say. Have you heard of the "rubber duck" method of debugging? The idea is that you put a little rubber duck on your desk and whenever you get stumped by a problem, you explain the problem to the duck and, as you put the problem into words, your brain figures out the answer. Well it turns out that it works for many tricky problems besides programming, you don't really need the duck, you don't actually have to use your mouth, and you can do it entirely in your own head, having the exchange with an imagined "reasonable person" (who is just another aspect of yourself consciously playing the role.) The key insight is that language is a tool for thinking, expressing problems in language can help your brain reason them out. Once you realize this, you should be able to consciously choose to have conversations with yourself as a tool for figuring problems out. > That seems crazy to me, because who does the other voice belong to? Me, obviously. The process is that of authoring a dialogue. If you write a short fictional story about you explaining your problems to a wise sage who asks lots of questions and then tries to come up with a reasonable answer, who is the sage? It's your creation as an author. Now do this process without the pen, just in your head. Who is the sage? The sage is still your creation, it's still an aspect of you, slightly divorced from your ego because you're deliberately playing a roll when you imagine what such a sage would say about your situation. But it's obviously still you, it's not a foreign voice in your head disconnected from your conscious will. It's not schizophrenia, it's just a process of 'talking' problems out to figure them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging |