When a voice rises from a nearby cubicle, a better question than "You talking to me?" may be "You talking to you?"

Susan Shapiro, a business-technology consultant, talks to herself constantly in what amounts to auditory to-do lists and step-by-step instructions. She calls herself an "idiot" at times, "brilliant" at others and occasionally says things out loud such as, "I can't believe I'm talking to myself out loud." She once discovered a colleague hovering behind her, waiting for her and her cubemate to finish their conversation. "We weren't talking to each other," she says. "We were each talking to ourselves."

Self-talking starts early, beginning as crib speech for the fun of it and becoming toddlers' repetition of rules they're learning to live by, researchers say. Late in life, you might say to yourself, "Why am I looking for my eyeglasses in the refrigerator?" only to discover — holy cow! — that's where you left them.

In between, in your cubicle-bound life, researchers say as many as 96 percent of people talk to themselves aloud, and deaf people have been observed signing to themselves while answering test questions. It's believed that people primarily blather to themselves when alone so as not to appear nuts. But those of us in the cube farm know better.

The irony is that self-chatter, like sharp objects, is both most suited and least suited to the workplace. "At work where we would most benefit from talking out loud is also the place we are least likely to do so for social reasons," says Alain Morin, a professor of psychology at the Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta.

Among the things it's useful for is what's called self-regulation: goal-setting, problem-solving, decisionmaking and planning. ("When she says, 'You already got a raise,' I'll say, 'Which didn't keep pace with inflation."') These conversations with one's self tend to increase, research shows, with the complexity of tasks and when someone's having a bad day.

"There's not a lot you can say when things are going really well: 'I want to keep things as they are,'" notes Tom Brinthaupt, professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University. Self-talk is "not that different from a thermostat. It's one of the ways we monitor ourselves, control impulses and guide actions."

The downside: "It can very much be disruptive."

Self-talk, unscientifically, also seems to be the stuff in the noisy maelstrom of the mind that slips out. It also ensures that at least one person is listening to you.

When the pressure's on before, say, a big presentation, there's a lot of anticipatory conversation — a stress rehearsal. Evan Steingart, former head of sales at a consumer-products company, worked with a salesman who rehearsed his entire pitch the day before he met with clients, including their objections in a different voice.