In 1882, Josef Breuer, then a young Austrian doctor, sat in a dimly lit wood-paneled room in a Viennese sanitorium. In front of him, a woman lay on a couch recounting incidents of childhood trauma and a devastating feeling of resentment towards her parents. In their meetings, the patient, Anna O, would do laborious “remembering work” where she would strive to recount memories aloud, and in effect, “dissolve them” by making sense of why she continued to experience intense ‘hysterical’ episodes as an adult—something we would more probably call anxiety and panic attacks today. The treatments were remarkably effective—over time, and through hours of conversation, all of her somatoform symptoms abated. Both she and Breuer believed the key to her treatment was verbalizing her troubled thoughts, allowing both her and Breuer to not only witness them, but additionally, to render them less powerful in her head. Their therapeutic treatments marked the beginning of “talking cure” sessions in what would become the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis.

Breuer went on to mentor Sigmund Freud, whose sex-focused approach toward psychoanalysis continues to characterize (and sometimes undermine) the discipline. While Freud believed that it was the psychoanalyst’s responsibility to diagnose the patient’s condition by making sense of their history and offering inventive treatments, Breuer’s contribution to the field, the “Talking Cure” was comparatively humble, premised on the idea that patients could make sense of their own history. A doctor might guide an introspective process by asking open-ended or Socratic-style questions—but much of the psychoanalytic benefit would come from the catharsis (derived from the Greek katharsis, meaning ‘purification’ or ‘cleansing’) itself, as a patient uttered things aloud for the first time.

In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, UC Berkeley professor Hannah Zeavin reiterates the emphasis on catharsis in her exploration of therapeutic modalities. Throughout the book, she challenges the classic doctor-patient dyad, proposing that it may actually represent a triad, the third ‘subject’ being the communicative interface the doctor and patient share. She explores how the effects of therapy can differ by form, from the letters that Freud wrote to his patients, or his “voiceless spirit of telepathy and the spirit voice of broadcast and peer-to-peer media,” to today’s encrypted Zoom calls. She argues that the emotional benefits of non-verbalized therapy (like the kind of text-based counseling now available on apps like BetterHelp or TalkSpace) offer anonymity, but lose immediacy—and in some cases, the cathartic benefit of witnessing one’s own words aloud.

Today, the “talking cure” is still the basis of most therapeutic practice, from the psychoanalyst’s canonical couch to the app in your hands. Confession remains important everywhere, from church basement AA meetings to the gold-latticed Catholic confessional booth. Different theoretical frameworks for “talking cure” models are essentially founded on the idea that verbalization itself can be curative, offering greater benefits than we might otherwise gain from merely thinking about something, and keeping it to ourselves.

We speak for many reasons: telling jokes and stories, articulating conflict, sharing our feelings, expressing affection, organizing our work, communicating information, teaching each other, asking questions, inspiring people toward hope or unity or violence. Sometimes, we talk just to hear ourselves: reading our work out loud to listen for typos, rehearsing a speech to an imaginary audience, preparing for a difficult conversation, cursing the coffee table after stubbing your toe in the night. Speaking aloud can be morally valuable, like those who are revered for “speaking up for what they believe in.” Or it can be a critique for those who presumably have nothing valuable to say, written off in the condemnation that “some people just want to hear themselves talk.” Whether confessional, inspirational or chit-chat, the common denominator of hearing ourselves talk is, simply, ourselves, generating unique cognitive effects when we do speak aloud.

Speech is more than a product of our thoughts, it’s actually bidirectional; what we say reinforces what we believe—an effect scientists have used to understand the way we experience the world. An example: while trying to understand how the brain makes sense of our environment, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison designed an experiment similar to I Spy (but with brain sensors). They tasked participants with finding objects in a crowded image, and offered different instructions. In one group, participants were instructed to say the name of the object that they were looking for out loud (in this case “banana”). Beyond the comedy of someone repeatedly whispering “banana” to themselves while looking frantically at a crowded page, researchers found that those calling for the hidden fruit, actually were more successful at finding it than the control group. Likewise, the impulse to run through your apartment chanting “keys” when you’re late (as if that will summon them) may not be misguided. Speaking aloud helps your brain make sense of the world, more than you might by merely thinking about it.

This is also true for reading aloud - which has been shown to improve memory through what some neuroscientists have termed the “production effect.” In their paper, researchers Noah Forrin and Colin Macleod describe this phenomenon as an “active cognitive process of encoding the word into speech [that] also helps to encode it into long-term memory,” emphasizing the benefits of verbalizing words. They note that the memory-making effects of reading aloud remain the same even when it’s material that someone else wrote, that “hearing one’s own voice provides a distinct stimulus of self-recognition.” Reading someone else’s work convinces the subconscious that the words belong to you. An audience intensifies this effect. Reading aloud to someone else was shown to improve memory—while reading aloud by yourself produced a much more mild effect. Whether it’s the heightened adrenaline of performance (and error) or the sense of exchange, reading to others allows us to commit knowledge to memory by witnessing our own words.

Language is multi-dimensional, exercised through different communicative capacities: speaking, listening, reading and writing. These four tenets of language can be divided into a grid of receptive (listening, reading) and productive (speaking, writing) ability. When learning and practicing language, each one reinforces the other, contributing to heightened understanding. Hearing more of a language helps us to speak it better, reading more of a language helps us to write it out. When any of these communicative abilities (listening, speaking, reading, writing) are paired with their inverse, the cognitive effects of both are amplified.

Language talks back to us, determining how we experience the world. The ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,’ a theory of linguistic relativity proposes that “language has a non-negligible effect on thinking…that languages are non-trivially different.” In the last century, this has been the central point of debate for linguists: how do we shape language, and how much does language shape us? In a major meta-analysis, linguists Jordan Zlatev and Johan Blomberg summarized decades of research that would challenge and support this claim. It’s difficult to extricate the differences between thought and language because they are so intimately connected, and “​​the two related questions if and how language affects the mind go back to the dawn of contemplative thought.” Scholars like Alexander Kravchenko have written that it’s impossible to overcome the “intrinsically dualistic assumption that there is, in fact, a phenomenon called ‘language’ that is ontologically independent of the phenomenon called ‘mind.” Kravchenko reasons that “mind cannot be understood without and outside of language.” Words will always be inadequate to describe the interiority of our thoughts.

But, over the last few decades, carefully designed studies have sought to control for diverse cultural values and individual communicative style. In a robust anthropological study, Stephen Levinson compiled years of research to inform how “linguistic diversity is reflected in cognitive diversity.” Through interview and puzzles that instructed different language speakers to solve problems, Levinson consistently found  that differing language speakers exercised a worldview that corresponded to the grammatical structure of their primary language. Sometimes, these were wordless, presenting spatial-linguistic puzzles that corresponded to different grammar structures in their native tongue. Depending on their language’s structure—and as it reflects cultural values like Hofstede’s five dimensions of culture: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, time orientation—people would approach problems with different strategies, or even different solutions. Language outlines the parameters of our thoughts as much as it conveys them, limiting where our imagination goes. Psycholinguist Steven Pinker described this as a “rock bottom” principle that “one’s language does determine how one must conceptualize reality when one has to talk about it.”

It also means that the way we talk to and about ourselves reinforces our self-perception. While studying the positive effects of self-talk, researchers found that talking to yourself from a second or third person perspective (i.e. “you’ve got this”) offered a more effective encouragement than the first person endorsement (i.e. “I’ve got this”). Basketball legend Lebron James is famous for speaking about himself in third person, a tendency that many have written off as narcissistic or detached from reality—but more likely has just bled over from his incredible athletic discipline, his heroic narrative-driven origin story, and his decades of being coached in self-talk, moving from first to second to third person, depending on the situational demand. Discussing his decision to join the Miami Heat back in 2010, “I wanted to do what was best for Lebron James, and what Lebron James was going to do to make him happy.” From Kanye West to Andre Agassi, famous, and famously successful, people working in high-stakes performance-oriented jobs explicitly attribute motivation to a unique third-person perspective.

Recently, the idea of positive self-talk has turned towards “manifestation,” a new-age idea that appeals because of its ambiguity, and its surprisingly noncommittal approach: wishing. In Youtube guides and Tik-Tok videos on “how to manifest,” well-dressed, ring-lit content creators, advise the viewer on how to speak your future into reality. Some proponents of manifestation say that it works by the law of attraction, which argues that positive energy is drawn to positive energy; others suggest you are moving all the molecules in the universe with your words.

The actual science behind this sort of manifestation is not metaphysical—saying something aloud won’t just make it true—but there is some science behind it: neuroplasticity. When we recite our desires, confess our wishes and profess our futures by ‘manifesting’ things like “I will be successful” or “I am beautiful,” we’re telling ourselves it’s true, bolstering a new worldview. In effect, we’re reworking our neural pathways and engineering new stimulus-response dynamics, correcting our self-doubt with self-confidence, our self-destructive thoughts with self-compassion. Practicing positivity and optimism will not necessarily precipitate good fortune, but saying these things out loud will likely make you more positive and optimistic. And speaking something out loud can help convince our brains that it’s real. Language doesn’t change the world around you, it changes how you see the world.

In a recent piece for Hii, “Sonic Diet: You Are What You Hear,” contributor Adrian DiMatteo explored the concept of a sonic diet: passively cultivating your thoughts by intentionally curating what you hear. To illustrate the concept of pure and positive sounds, DiMatteo offers ritual prayers from cultures across the world: hymns, prayers, incantations, and chants, among others, advocating for a more thoughtful personal soundscape. Conversely, it’s as important to be impeccable with the productive aspects of language, captured by Don Miguel Ruiz in his famous spiritual text, The Four Agreements. He writes, “God creates reality, and we re-create reality with the word.” There are literally hundreds of references to speaking carefully in the Bible, as in Proverbs 15:4, “A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit” or Matthew 12:36, “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak.” The Buddha was even more unequivocal about the power of our speech to inspire peace and avoid harm, emphasizing the human capacity for “Right Speech.” As one of the Five Precepts for Ethical Conduct and the third component of the Noble Eightfold Path, this kind of speech is intentional, careful, “abstains from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter” as in the Pali Canon.

Still, if the neuroplastic effects of speaking seem ambiguous, amorphous and conveniently manipulable, that’s because they are. While thoughts bubble in and out of our head all day, speaking is also inherently ephemeral—only as memorable as we make it, literally vanishing into the air around us. Humans produce speech by bringing air from the lungs to the larynx, where it’s shaped by the articulators in the mouth and nose. For nearly all of human history, before the age of transmission, amplification and recording, a conversation started, ended and disappeared into the air it came from, never to be heard again.

That’s changed. In 1857, 30 years before Josef Breuer met with the troubled Anna O, scientist Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville became the first person in human history to record his voice and listen to it when he invented and patented the phonautograph. Today, we hear ourselves all the time—in real time and in playback. In huge collections of Zoom recordings, Instagram videos, sound notes and streaming, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing our voices spoken back to us. Even when the pitch and timbre, distorted by the anatomies of our ear canals, differ from how we imagine we sound, the voice is still yours, opening the portal between you and the external world. The power of speaking aloud is not just in what it communicates to others, but the generative effects of witnessing ourselves. We, too, are creating the world we hear.