Autocommunication is a term used in communication studies, semiotics and other cultural

studies to describe communication from and to oneself. This is distinguished from the more
traditionally studied form of communication where the sender and the receiver of the message
are separate. This can be called heterocommunication.
So autocommunication seems to primarily a cultural studies term. It hasn't hit me yet that this is
so, because there are similar terms in philosophy (e.g. introspection), psychology (e.g. inner
speech), physiology (e.g. proprioception), etc. It may very well be that it is portrayed this way
because only Lotman and Broms are cited in this article, and the notion in question is specifically
autocommunication, not self-communication. There's a very important aspect to this: in cultural
studies the "self" that communicates with itself is a "supraindividual" self. It's not even a "social"
self, but a society as a self.
Where heterocommunication gives the receiver new information, autocommunication does not.
Instead it enhances and restructures the receiver's ego. Both forms of communication can be
found either in individuals or within organisations. When autocommunication is done by an
individual it can be called intrapersonal communication.
Autocommunication is typical for religious or artistic works. Prayers, mantras and diaries are
good examples. In organisations and corporations strategic plans and memos, for example, can
function like mantras. But any text (or work) can become autocommunicational if it is read many
times over.
http://jeesusjalutasallveelaeval.blogspot.ro/2013/08/autocommunication.html
Intrapersonal communication is a communicator's internal use of language or thought. It can be
useful to envision intrapersonal communication occurring in the mind of the individual in a
model which contains a sender, receiver, and feedback loop.
Our ability to talk to ourselves and think in words is a major part of the human experience of
consciousness. From an early age, individuals are encouraged by society to introspect carefully,
but also to communicate the results of that introspection.[3] Simon Jones and Charles
Fernyhough cite research suggesting that our ability to talk to ourselves is very similar to regular
speech.[4] This theory originates with the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who
observed that children will often narrate their actions out loud before eventually replacing the
habit with the adult equivalent: sub-vocal articulation. During sub-vocal articulation, no sound is
made but the mouth still moves. Eventually, adults may learn to inhibit their mouth movements,
although they still experience the words as "inner speech".

Evolved to avoid silence

Joseph Jordania suggested that talking to oneself can be used to avoid silence. According to him,
the ancestors of humans, like many other social animals, used contact calls to maintain constant
contact with the members of the group,[6] and a signal of danger was communicated through
becoming silent and freezing.[7] Because of the human evolutionary history, prolonged silence is
perceived as a sign of danger and triggers a feeling of uneasiness and fear. According to Jordania,
talking to oneself is only one of the ways to fill in prolonged gaps of silence in humans. Other

ways of filling in prolonged silence are humming, whistling, finger drumming, or having TV,
radio or music on all the time.

Intrapersonal communication and personal pronouns

Intrapersonal communication can be facilitated through both first person and second person
pronouns. However, through years of research, scholars have already realized that people tend to
use first-person and second-person self-talk in different situations. Generally speaking, people
are more likely to use the second-person pronoun referring to the self when there is a need for
self-regulation, an imperative to overcome difficulties, and facilitation of hard actions [8][9]
whereas first person intrapersonal talks are more frequently used when people are talking to
themselves about their feelings. [10]
Recent research also has revealed that using the second-person pronoun to provide selfsuggestion is more effective in promoting the intentions to carry out behaviors and performances.
[11] The rationale behind this process lies in the idea of classical conditioning, a habit theory
which argues that repetition of a stable behavior across consistent contexts can strongly reinforce
the association between the specific behavior and the context. Building on such rationale,
forming internal conversations using second-person pronouns can naturally reproduce the effect
of previous encouragement or positive comments from others, as people have already gotten
used to living under second-person instructions and encouragements in their childhood. This selfstimulated encouragement and appraisals from previous experience could also generate positive
attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.

Self-regulation theory (SRT) is a system of conscious personal management that involves the
process of guiding one's own thoughts, behaviors, and feelings to reach goals

1) Biases corrupt introspection

Cognitive biases are introspections first stumbling block. Significant biases include the
inclination to see oneself in a positive and socially desirable way (positivity bias), the tendency
for people to interpret events in accordance to their previous beliefs and expectations (perceptual
confirmation), and the need for self-consistency.
It is unfortunate that biases training is not part of our education curricula. Many people do not
have accurate knowledge about cognitive biases effects, and the situations where they are likely
to occur. Thus, many fail to correct, or even become aware of these biases. We go through life
with rose-tinted glasses glued to our faces, and we often forget that they are there.

The difficulty with introspection is made worse by our frequent misconceptions about ourselves,
as we turn our rose-tinted glasses inwards. We often underestimate our own susceptibility to
biases and overestimate the amount of control we have over our mental processes. Overconfident
and under-prepared, we often do not see the need to take the appropriate steps to avoid mental
errors.
3) We cannot penetrate our unconscious
Yet our biggest barrier may be that much of our minds are inaccessible, hidden in the
unconscious. Even if we could be unbiased in our introspections, we will still be unable to access
certain mental processes and attributes. We play on the surface of the water, without knowing
how deep the ocean goes.
A clearer definition of the unconscious is needed here: I am not referring to the Freudian
concept of repression mainstream psychology has long moved away from that.
Instead, many researchers adopt the idea of the adaptive unconscious. 5 These processes are not
unconscious due to Freudian repression; they are unconscious due to the architecture of the
mind. Like a good delegator, the mind assigns certain processes to the unconscious, so that it is
able to function more efficiently and quickly. 6
An intuitive example of this process would be our visual perceptions, where much of the process
of disambiguating, identifying and reacting to external objects is fast, effortless and unconscious.
The sacrifice we make for our minds efficiency is that we cannot access the processes that were
delegated to the unconscious. When we try to peek into the murky depths of our unconscious
through introspection, instead of accessing the desired body of knowledge, we often end up
making up information that is drawn from previous beliefs and expectations, like a child seeing
faces in the wall
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sze/introspection-research_b_7306546.html

The idea that people can be mistaken about their inner functioning is one applied by eliminative
materialists. These philosophers suggest that some concepts, including "belief" or "pain" will
turn out to be quite different from what is commonly expected as science advances.
The faulty guesses that people make to try and explain their thought processes have been called
"causal theories".[1] The causal theories provided after an action will often serve only to justify
the person's behaviour in order to relieve cognitive dissonance. That is, a person may not have
noticed the real reasons for their behavior, even when trying to provide explanations. The result
is an explanation that mostly just makes themselves feel better. An example might be a man who
discriminates against homosexuals because he is embarrassed that he himself is attracted to other

men. He may not admit this to himself, instead claiming his prejudice is because he believes that
homosexuality is unnatural.

Research suggests that much of our preferences, attitudes, and ideas come from the adaptive
unconscious. However, subjects themselves do not realize this, and they are "unaware of their
own unawareness".[2] People wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their
mental states. A subject is likely to give explanations for their behavior (i.e. their preferences,
attitudes, and ideas), but a subject tends to be inaccurate in their insight. The false explanations
of their own behavior is the what psychologists call the Introspection illusion.
In some experiments, subjects provide explanations that are fabricated, distorted, or
misinterpreted memories, but not lies a phenomenon called confabulation. This suggests that
introspection is instead an indirect, unreliable process of inference.[3] It has been argued that this
"introspection illusion" underlies a number of perceived differences between the self and other
people, because people trust these unreliable introspections when forming attitudes about
themselves but not about others.[4][5][6]
However, this theory of the limits of introspection has been highly controversial, and it has been
difficult to test unambiguously how much information individuals get from introspection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion

In two experiments, researcher Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia found evidence
that a brain signal called corollary discharge a signal that helps us distinguish the sensory
experiences we produce ourselves from those produced by external stimuli plays an important
role in our experiences of internal speech.
The findings from the two experiments are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science.
Corollary discharge is a kind of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to explain, for
example, why other people can tickle us but we cant tickle ourselves. The signal predicts our
own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle sensation.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/internal-speech-is-driven-bypredictive-brain-signal.html

The insular cortex: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/health/psychology/06brain.html?_r=0