You know the ones. The muttering under your breath while you work. The chronic doodling in the margin of every notebook you have ever owned. The tendency to overthink a two-line email for the better part of an afternoon. The occasional swear word that arrives, fully formed, in the middle of a sentence where a milder word would have done just as well. Somebody in your life has, at some point, gently or not so gently, suggested you might want to work on those.
It turns out, on the accumulated evidence of a surprising amount of peer-reviewed research over the past two decades, that most of them are pointing in the opposite direction from the one they seemed to be pointing in. What people have been reading as scattered attention, low self-control, or nervous energy is often a set of behaviours associated with quite high cognitive functioning. Not always. But often.
This video goes into the 6 Signs You’re Not Weird, You’re Highly Intelligent:
The talking-to-yourself habit, which social convention treats as slightly embarrassing, has been documented across dozens of studies as a genuine cognitive aid. Speaking your thoughts aloud, on the current experimental record, appears to help the brain organise information, direct attention, and hold task-relevant instructions in working memory. According to a 2012 study by Alexander Kirkham, Julian Breeze and Paloma Marí-Beffa at Bangor University, published in the journal Acta Psychologica, participants who read task instructions aloud showed measurably better task-switching performance than participants who read the same instructions silently.
The doodling in the margins, similarly, turns out to be doing considerable work. According to a widely cited 2010 study by Dr Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, participants who were instructed to doodle during a boring two and a half minute audio recording remembered 29 per cent more of the factual details from the recording than participants in the control condition, who were simply asked to listen to the recording and note down the names of the party attendees mentioned in it. Doodling, on Andrade’s interpretation, keeps the mind from drifting off during a low-stimulation task by giving it a small secondary channel of engagement, which is enough to prevent the far more disruptive process of full-scale daydreaming. The person in the meeting drawing tiny spirals in the corner of the page is not, on the empirical evidence, less engaged than the person sitting perfectly still. In many cases, they are considerably more engaged.
The frequent swearing, which is perhaps the most socially penalised of these habits, has also had its reputation quietly revised. According to a 2015 study by Kristin and Timothy Jay published in the journal Language Sciences, titled “Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth”, participants were given standard verbal fluency tests, in which they had to list as many words as possible starting with a given letter within one minute, and were then given a comparable task with taboo words and swear words. The researchers found a clear positive correlation. Participants who generated the most words in the standard verbal fluency test also generated the most swear words. The folk assumption that people swear because they lack the vocabulary for something better has the direction of the relationship exactly backwards. A rich swearing vocabulary is, in most cases, one visible marker of a rich vocabulary in general.
The overthinking, and the specific pattern of turning small worries over and over in the mind at inconvenient hours, may be the most surprising of the four. According to research by Alexander Penney, Victoria Miedema and Dwight Mazmanian at Lakehead University in Ontario, published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015, verbal intelligence was positively correlated with the tendency to worry and to ruminate. The researchers proposed that people who are more verbally intelligent may be more able to describe and elaborate on past and future events in fine detail, which is the same cognitive capacity that lets them rehearse worst-case scenarios in vivid and painful specificity at three in the morning. The mechanism that keeps you up thinking about the awkward thing you said in a meeting six weeks ago is not, on the emerging evidence, a defect in your cognitive machinery. It is a side effect of the same machinery working rather well, in a direction you would rather it not be pointed.
None of this means that self-talk, doodling, swearing, or overthinking are always good, or that they never carry costs. Chronic worry, in particular, is genuinely difficult to live with and is closely associated with anxiety disorders that benefit from proper treatment. But the popular judgement that these habits reflect scattered attention, low intelligence, or lack of self-discipline is not what the current cognitive-science literature supports. The evidence points the other way. What looks from the outside like restlessness or oddity often turns out, on closer research, to be one visible edge of a mind that is doing more work than is obvious.
The uncomfortable observation this leaves us with is that most of us have spent quite a lot of our lives being taught to suppress the very behaviours that were, in fact, helping us think. The doodler was told to put down the pen. The person muttering to themselves was told to be quiet. The person who swore fluently was told to clean up their language. And the person who worried too much was told, usually by people who worried considerably less, that they were making themselves difficult to be around.
None of that advice was entirely wrong. Some of it was well meant. Some of it was necessary in specific social contexts. But some of it was quietly asking the person to become a slightly less capable version of themselves for the comfort of the people around them. And on the current cognitive-science record, the habits that most reliably attract this kind of correction from other people are, disproportionately, the ones the corrected person should probably keep.
Kiran Athar is not a psychologist or a neuroscientist. She writes about psychology, brain science, and the ordinary corners of life where the two intersect, drawing on peer-reviewed research and primary-source scholarship.
