I absolutely do not do this at work or in front of other people.

Some time back I read an essay by A.J Ayer in which he claimed he did much the same thing, which lowered my guilt level in engaging in a similar behavior. Ayer described it as “gabble”, which is something of an uncommon word.

I talk to myself all the time, usually as imagined dialogue for fictional situations. Sometimes if I anticipate an argument I’ll try to work it out beforehand this way. I really am kind of a nutter, I think.

In my own personal experience I’ve never noticed any correlation between race and talking to oneself in public. Josh’s taxonomy makes sense to me, although it tends to lump me into group 1, along with the mentally ill, since if I do talk to myself in public I’m generally oblivious to doing it until I catch myself (at which time I clam up).

But it’s not like I’m thinking out loud, either. Not in some expository/narrative sense, anyway; more like bits of half-baked cognition are leaking out unfiltered. A musical sentence here, a snatch of observation there, a vocal rendering of some bit of something I’m reading. In that latter case, I sometimes catch myself, when reading a book with a lot of human physical/emotive description, miming or “trying out” some bit of stage direction (so to speak) going on with a character. Shrugging when they shrug; trying to ape some complicated juxtaposition of facial tics; etc.

One of the things that I hate when I read fiction is when characters utter well-formed, self-directed expository “thoughts”. It strikes me as ridiculous, as just plain bad writing. And while in some cases it definitely is bad writing, I’m willing to accept that I have some personal bias because I can’t fathom expounding, out loud, factual observations to myself. Folks who do do that no doubt find such passages a lot more plausible, and would probably find my objection to be the weird thing.

1. Unconscious, wholly self-absorbed self-talk — no reaction to passersby, no explicit sign that they know or at least care that they’re speaking out loud.
2. Self-conscious but self-absorbed — cues in eye contact, vocal modulation suggest they’re aware that they’re speaking and that others can hear them, but not sign that they’re choosing their words or targeting their speech based on that awareness.
3. Self-conscious and reactive — aware they’re talking to themselves, aware that passersby can hear them, some degree of acknowledgement in tone and topic that they’re watching and being watched.
4. Social prompting — ostensibly self-directed speech that seems to be intended largely to provoke some sort of conversational response or interjection from others.

Case (4) seems like what what iguana is referencing with the “big time attention-seeker”; I’ve seen it from people I know in just such a case, but also from strangers on the street who clearly want to draw someone into conversation regardless of an exisiting familiarity.

Case (1) I mostly associate with mentally ill people; in downtown Portland, that usually corresponds to apparently homeless folks, though in other parts of town where convalescent/halfway houses are more common, or on the bus system, there are folks who seem to be in less dire straits but still not in control of their speech.

It feels like the core of grumblebee’s question — is this paranoia, or are they actually reacting to me? — is straddling the line between (2) and (3), and that’s hazy territory.

I’d say my experiences mostly involve white homeless and/or drunk folks, a few black and hispanic — Portland doesn’t have, proportionally, that big of a black population compared to a lot of bigger cities — and I run into (1), (2) and (3) on a regular basis and have a hard time sometimes telling one from the other. Part of that is that I’ve seen people switch modes, “upgrading” if you will from (1) to (2) or from (2) to (3) after an interval of time. Whether and how much that’s intentional, it’s hard to say.

For my part, I don’t really talk to myself in public. I do it when I’m home alone all day, though. It’s something I’ve actually started to think of as the Stir Crazy threshold—if I have the day off and my wife doesn’t, by early afternoon I’ll usually be talking (or singing) descriptive nonsense to myself (repeating phrases I’m reading, creating miniature songs about some thought or some bit of stimulus, etc) without thinking about it. It’s such a consistent phenomenon at this point that I can’t help but wonder if it relates to some innate neurological instinct to create verbal stimulus, or some kind of human stimulus, when in relative isolation.

I do know one individual who is a big time attention-seeker. She usually feels like nobody is paying attention to her so she goes out of her way to draw attention to herself, so sometimes she’ll talk, say, when she’s in a room adjacent to other people so that the other people will have to engage in conversation with her in order to find out what she’s saying. But are your street passers-by looking for attention? Certainly not in the same way I’m talking about.

The only other talking-to-oneself that I witness is by mentally unstable people. (I grew up near a, um, I have no idea what the PC name for it is but it’s a big apartment building for mentally unstable people, and they were free to come and go.) Lots of talking going on in that neighborhood, not many people listening.

So basically, I’m not really familiar with the particular talking-to-oneself behavior of which you speak. When I think of examples, they come from movies.