I find it ingenious. I used to worry when my mum read the same page of her book out loud again and again, especially as she kept forgetting to turn the page, so she didn't get past the introduction. When we go out in my son's car, she reads signposts out loud, and quite often after reading a place name she may have remembered once, the conversation would run like this, "Darlington" "No I don't want to go to Darlington" Barnard Castle" "No I don't want to go to Barnard Castle"
She gets cross if she has an accident and doesn't get to the toilet on time. She looks at me and says very angrily "Now look at the mess you have made!" I used to think she was blaming me, but eventually, I came to realize that this was an out of body experience so that she didn't get upset about what had happened, so in a way, it was a self-defense mechanism.
Thanks to your posts I now get it. I think that time is moving at a different speed for them.
Imagine if you are alone for what you feel might be for hours, it doesn't matter if someone else is there, in your mind you can feel alone even if in a crowd. If you were in solitary confinement for days on end, one thing you should try to do is to imagine you are with other people who can speak to you, and to whom you can speak. To help even more, you should speak out loud. This means you are controlling your voice and having control over the answer. If you can speak out loud and hear an answer through that imagination you are stimulating something both imaginary and physical as well.
That's why sometimes if you are busy doing something physical, you might find it easier to complete the task if you play a song and sing along with it, or is it just me that does that?