It appears that AJ Jacobs is writing a book on self experimentation and this very lovely article on managing the many daemons in your brain is a portion. It is a good addition to the thread about self control and attention management.
My favorite bit involves a shocking idea. Language evolved so we could talk to ourselves. Or, I’d say, so our various inner daemons could talk to each other. I even find myself wondering if one of them didn’t stumble upon it and discover it now had a huge competitive advantage over it’s siblings.
The less shocking, but still fascinating, is that one way to keep your attention focused is to talk – preferable out loud – about what your doing.
I have wondered about those busy executives who are talking on their bluetooth headsets as they walk through the airport concourse. How many of them are really talking to whatever the modern equivalent is of the Dictaphone? You could be walking along dictating your correspondence and the world would not even think that you were weird in any way because technology has let us talk to ourselves out loud without that narrative being a signal of some inner disturbance.
I use free dial2do.com (mostly to cast out daemons into email box); and there are number of phone dictation services that are more pricy.
But presumably there are large number of people who would like to be talking out loud to themselves but who have been silenced by social norms; now for the cost of popping a bluetooth headset in one ear they can route around those rules. I wonder how many people do that?