[HN Gopher] Split Brain Psychology
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Split Brain Psychology
Author : superb-owl
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-08-13 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (superbowl.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (superbowl.substack.com)
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I'd really like the author who has no idea what is going on with
| Dissociative Identity Disorder to not go about mentioning DID in
| the same breath as schizophrenia.
|
| They are not related in any way. Schizophrenia is explicitly
| neurochemical and treatable with medication. Schizophrenia is
| something you can be genetically predisposed to and born with.
|
| DID and related dissociative disorders are based in trauma and
| are NOT something you can be born with. While trauma can cause
| neurological changes, they are not neurochemical in nature, and
| they DO NOT respond to medication. There is no medication for
| DID, and its incredibly irresponsible to equate these in a
| crackpot Jungian-style bicameral mind theory blog post. I
| discovered Jung's bicameral mind shortly after becoming aware of
| my own dissociative disorder, and while it provided a nice
| distraction and piece of thought, it ultimately has nothing to do
| with my disorder.
|
| My alters ARE NOT VOICES, they are not hallucinations, they do
| not present audibly. They are me, they are my thoughts and
| feelings and preferences presented in different ways from
| different points in my life. They present as internal thoughts
| and feelings the same way anyone else would think and feel
| internally, and we (my alter states and dissociative people)
| organize them as individuals because the dissociation makes that
| easy, but they are all me. They are my competing emotional states
| that arose because I was forced to hold these states inside me to
| survive my ongoing abuse.
|
| If the author is reading this, DO NOT bring up Dissociative
| Identity Disorder with schizophrenia and then go on to refer to
| both as "the schizophrenic". That's frankly insulting to me,
| people like me, and the INTENSE trauma we went through at the
| hands of rapists and abusers (usually parents and family members)
| and your entire piece is trash just for that alone.
|
| I wish I had enough karma here to downvote your post.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| schizo-effective disorders can also be based in trauma. It
| sounds like you don't know much about schizophrenia if you're
| disturbed by the association.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Hey, many apologies, I in no way meant to conflate DID with
| schizophrenia. I only meant to mention DID in passing - the
| following sentences were only meant to apply to schizophrenia.
| Sorry if that wasn't clear.
|
| I'm sorry for what you went through, and if you feel my post
| misrepresented you.
|
| Edit: I've modified the article a bit to hopefully make this
| clearer.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I'll give you a freebie edit, you can qualify it as the
| thoughts of an individual dissociative reader:
|
| > Important to note, that the alters in dissociative
| disorders are not voices, in the classical sense of
| hallucinations, they do not typically present audibly. They
| are generally perceived as the individual's mind states
| (thoughts, feelings, preferences, and memories) from
| different points in their life. They present as internal
| thoughts and feelings the same way anyone else would think
| and feel internally, yet the language used by those with DID
| organizes them as individuals because the dissociation makes
| that easy. They are all still that individual even if the
| alters perceive themselves to be separate in that way.
|
| This, I think, might back up your point more saliently than
| the schizophrenic angle anyway, but I admit I didn't read the
| article to take your point as once I saw you mention
| multiplicity, I speed-scrolled to the inevitable mental
| health/psychology section to see just how bad it was.
|
| I moderate AskDID and used to moderate the DID subreddit
| before the mod team devolved into hurt people hurting hurt
| people, so I have some exposure to how the community
| perceives themselves.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| >My alters ARE NOT VOICES, they are not hallucinations, they do
| not present audibly.
|
| What if a healthy individual and a individual with dissociative
| disorder are just experiencing the same process from a
| different angle?
|
| The author of the bestselling book "The Power of Now" speaks
| about some mental processes as if they were other entities
| (inner voice, pain body, etc) and yet he is not in a mental
| health unit.
|
| You see your body as part of you but not the chair you are
| sitting on. The brain is certainly able to move the boundaries
| of what is you and what not. For example, some musicians
| experience the instrument they are playing as part of
| themselves. it's not far fetched to think that the same can
| also be applied to mental processes.
| bsedlm wrote:
| what is truly flabbergasting is the use and application of
| trauma induction as a technique by shadowy persons within
| governments and other "for the science" and later on "for the
| [your cause of choice], we must use these techniques, lest the
| rivals use them too and we lose".
|
| traumatized people passing on their traumas. some very clever
| powerful persons using traumatized people like they use other
| tools and instruments.
| aordano wrote:
| The perspective presented re: schizophrenia is awful too.
|
| The author appears to be very ignorant of the last 20? 30?
| years of research in both schizophrenia and DID. I can tell
| just at a glance both by having professional experience in
| those areas, and by having to deal with both disorders of them
| every day (my life partner has both DID and schizophrenia).
|
| Making this sort of publications without actually acquainting
| with the state of the art is dangerous, reckless, and frankly
| just plain insulting.
|
| Freudian/Jungian psychology and its derivatives have done
| enough damage already, let them die.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Anything I specifically said about schizophrenia you'd like
| corrected?
|
| I'm happy to make edits if I'm wrong (especially if I'm
| dangerously wrong!)
| aordano wrote:
| First, sorry for being so rude in my previous comment, and
| what i might put here. There is a lot of misinformation out
| there (and in the article) and it hurts people in very
| tangible ways. Stigma and misinformation can very literally
| kill.
|
| There is a lot of inaccurate information, and a lot of
| unknowns being taken as fact in this article.
|
| For starters, almost any model of the mind based on ideas
| of wither Freud or Jung have been thoroughly... i won't say
| "disproven" because there is no proof for any of this
| within reach of humanity so far, but they are effectively
| useless. Those models don't account for a lot of things,
| lead to wrong outcomes in others, and overall they are a
| bad way to describe what's going on inside the psyche of a
| person.
|
| Some characteristics of those models can be inherited into
| newer models, but basing anything off them will lead to
| routes that won't be representative of the way the mind of
| a person works, whether is neurotypical or not.
|
| Having this in the middle of the article demolishes
| whatever credence one might hope to sustain about what it
| further develops.
|
| As you point out, the "voices" that schizophrenic people
| might hear are not a simple auditory hallucination; though
| just saying it's reasonable to say they are actual selves
| is taking an idea in a very simplistic way. Here is where
| the issue begins, a person not versed whatsoever in
| psychology reads the article and believes as gospel what is
| said here in a very simplified way, the nuance is lost in
| the middle.
|
| Whether the voices of a person with schizophrenia,
| schizotypal disorder, or schizoaffective disorder might
| actually be discriminated as having the same qualities as a
| disembodied being, is dependent on the specifics on the
| case, how is it treated, and how other comorbidities might
| interact with it. Things regarding mental illnesses are
| extremely messy and extremely hard to grasp even for
| trained professionals with specific experience in the area
| (years to find a psychiatrist qualified enough to treat my
| partner. years!).
|
| The article contains a lot more bad sources, inaccurate
| understanding of the self and the inner dialogue (that not
| even everyone has) and has a haphazard mixture between pop-
| psych and neuroscience that conflates things that are
| pertinent to a certain domain as generalizable or
| universal.
|
| I'm sorry but this is not good and it's not as simple as
| correcting a thing or two about schizophrenia, because when
| i read the whole thing it screams "i don't really know what
| i'm talking about but i will throw a bunch of sources and
| topics and pretend i do". Maybe you're knowledgeable about
| this stuff and just the process of simplifying things for
| the article butchered everything, or maybe you don't really
| have much idea about what you're writing. In any case if
| you want i can give you some books/papers/sources, or chat
| about the subject, feel free to contact me.
|
| And again, sorry for being so rude earlier.
| breck wrote:
| If I had to place a bet right now on who the future will judge
| was the Darwin of our time, I would bet on Marvin Minsky.
|
| This Split-Brain post asks "What if I'm not the only person in my
| head?". IMO this may be the most fascinating question to work on
| today.
|
| Minsky answered it IMO conclusively in his Society of Mind
| (1986), just as Darwin answered the question "Where do species
| come from?". There is no "you", but a collection of
| agents/resources inside your brain. The details are still being
| discovered by the great work of folks like Hawkins, but Minsky's
| theory seems like a bullseye.
|
| Split-brain is on the right track, but the N is a lot higher.
| csours wrote:
| What if your dominant personality ate all it's siblings and
| that's why you only hear one voice?
|
| Anyway, there are multiple centers in your brain that process
| different sensations and conditions - you perceive hunger,
| thirst, anger, temperature etc.
|
| Think about a "computer" like a desktop or laptop. How many
| computers are in the computer? There are many chips that run
| programs, but are not considered "the CPU".
|
| What if your hunger perceiver was conscious, but your .... main
| consciousness didn't let it talk.
|
| It could be an interesting science fiction story at least.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think those are separate phenomena. There are plenty of
| essentially input filters in your brain which are very far from
| consciousness. For example point and edge detection in vision
| can be exactly mapped to individual neurons and there wouldn't
| be any consciousness involved in that process.
|
| The brain seems to be organized into layers. The bottom layers
| are simple things which turn raw input into a higher more
| useful abstraction like transforming visual signals into "this
| is a line". Abstractions get piled together in the lower levels
| which are generally well understood and the very top levels
| being consciousness which isn't understood at all. It wouldn't
| be at all surprising if consciousness had many components with
| many locations.
| ninesnines wrote:
| Eh maybe its because I've spent a lot of time studying
| neuroscience and psychology, but I think the jump from the split
| brain phenomena due to cutting the corpus callosum to having
| multiple internal 'people' is kind of a large jump. It also seems
| obvious to me that parts of your brain are communicating, and if
| you cut a large connection, then they will need time to form new
| connections and ways of perceiving the world.
|
| And of course we all contain many layers in terms of personality
| etc. I also would be careful at taking Freuds words too closely
| -- a lot of his works were not backed explicitly by science, and
| many psychologists don't support his ideas.
|
| But of course maybe I'm just engrained with traditional thinking
| -- I can suggest listening to Jeff Hawkin's podcast on Lex
| Fridman. He has some interesting novel ideas on neuroscience that
| pushed me to think a bit more abstractly.
| colechristensen wrote:
| What I think is demonstrated is that you can cut a conscious
| brain in half in the right way to result in two separate
| consciousness entities.
|
| In the same way that you could cut a small piece of a person's
| brain out and the larger remaining piece is still conscious, it
| would follow that there is no single point in the brain where
| you could divide it in half and say this half has the
| consciousness the other one does not. Consciousness must then
| be distributed amongst a certain portion of brain matter and
| can be cut and still exist separately in both cut pieces.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Follow that thought process down the rabbit hole and you
| arrive, inexorably, at panpsychism.
| Malic wrote:
| CGP Grey did a video essay on this.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| I have schizotypal personality disorder. For me it feels like a
| collective, kind of like the borg. I say "me" or "I" when
| communicating externally, but all thoughts are actually
| communicated as "us". All entities speak with the same voice
| (what most people think of as their inside voice), but each one
| speaks _differently_ , with a different pace/tone, and has its
| own personality, thoughts, and desires. There are a handful of
| dominant ones that sit in the captain's chair so to speak, and
| they all have a say in how we behave externally.
|
| For example one of us is a pacifist, another one loves to
| socialize and party, one is cautious and anxious, the other very
| confident, and there's one that has a severe thirst for violence
| and blood-lust (this one we work hard to keep in check). I've
| literally been in fights where immediately after knocking my
| opponent down, I ask if they're ok and then help them back up and
| let them go. Then there's hundreds of transient entities that are
| usually clones of personalities observed elsewhere (movie
| characters, celebrities, or other influential people). These
| transient types will actually adopt the mannerisms, voice, and
| even accent of the personalities and display them outwardly!
| Makes for very weird interactions with family and friends lol.
|
| I've yet to see anyone on reddit or elsewhere with this
| description of the disorder. The closest thing is DID or maybe
| even borderline personality disorder (which is on the same schizo
| spectrum), but there's no disassociation with what I have, we're
| all fully aware of what the other is thinking.
|
| EDIT: added further clarifications on the differing voices
| walleeee wrote:
| Do "you" identify with one entity, as is often reported among
| tulpamancers, or do "you" stand apart from them all? When you
| hear one or another of your internal voices, or become aware of
| an entity's thoughts, is it from the perspective of another,
| perhaps depersonalized agent observing the rest? Do "you" have
| equal access to all entities or is it more accurate to think of
| yourself as one among them with a privileged perspective?
|
| Thanks in advance for any insight you might be willing to
| provide. I hope these questions are not too invasive, your
| comment is of great interest to me.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Good questions and no they're not invasive, so no worries.
| Each day (and sometimes each interaction) the person acting
| as "me" is just one of the entities taking over, so
| effectively there's no central "me" at all if that makes
| sense. Today it's introverted family-man, but if we attend an
| event in the evening for example, the more social personality
| takes over and listens in on the conversations from family-
| man and others. Let's say the social one is currently active
| and sitting at the bar with friends having a great time, the
| family-man will say "we should text our wife and let her know
| we'll be home late" to which the social one may respond with
| "nah, we'll do it later" or "yeah that's a good idea, we'll
| do it now".
|
| EDIT: to answer your last question about "equal access", we
| share thoughts and deliberate, but one can't exert control
| over the others nor forcefully take over. The active person
| at any given moment depends on the outside environment and
| what we decide is best for the situation, so it's kind of a
| democratic process; not sure if that can be defined as equal
| access or not.
| nier wrote:
| Did you do training to have your parts communicate with
| each other? I tried imaginative meditation with the goal of
| for example bringing my collective to sit around a cosy
| campfire, become friends and ask for each other's advice.
| But in my case I always had a strong sense of a single me
| and only recently discovered that due to stress or an
| overwhelming feeling of happiness one part of that whole
| becomes very dominant. In that regard, what you describe as
| an entity taking over sounds very familiar to me.
|
| I want to get better at integrating my personas and am
| wondering if meditation is the only way forward. Any tips?
| markk wrote:
| This is interesting. So is the person writing here is one
| of these personalities? Or are "you" watching one of these
| personalities writing?
|
| If the former, are there any personalities that are not
| aware they are one of many?
| MAMAMassakali wrote:
| Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol
| kgeist wrote:
| I don't know if I have a disorder or anything, but I've always
| felt since childhood that the actual "me" is a silent observer
| with little control over anything, and my body and thought
| processes are largely controlled by a different entity (much
| smarter than me) coexisting in my head. And that other entity
| wants me to believe it's all my decisions/actions, not theirs,
| and I'm in full control. It started with the realization that
| whenever I look at a problem, for example, a math problem, it
| just "clicks" with no actual effort on my part, as if someone
| else works hard solving it and just gives me the final answers,
| and all I do is take credit for it.
|
| Maybe it's not a disorder per se, but a very peculiar kind of
| self-perception. If someone knows if it's a known phenomenon in
| psychology, I'd like to hear more about it.
| plutonorm wrote:
| This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID,
| you can be both.
|
| Most people choose and have chosen all their lives to group all
| their thoughts into one unitary personality. Others haven't.
| It's all an illusion anyway in my humble opinion. There are
| only chains of thoughts/feelings and we associate with those
| chains a feeling of "I" or "other", but the reality is it's
| just a meandering walk.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Thank you for sharing. There are philosophical theories of mind
| that say we are all essentially like this but generally in a
| much less explicit way. The label "disorder" gets put on a
| person when the divisions become more explicit and come to the
| surface or when the darker aspects get control instead of being
| appropriately moderated by the rest.
|
| I have been close to people who absolutely had a different
| consciousness take the wheel so to speak during extreme stress
| and entirely believe this division of mind is real.
| mxkopy wrote:
| I've had experiences on psychedelics where my consciousness
| gets peeled back like an onion, with each layer being
| manifested by the drug as a separate voice. Things that we
| don't typically associate with an inner voice, like
| appraising some object or forming a reaction, became very
| explicit dialogues between influences in my mind. The loud
| ones were friends that I remember fondly. Some of them were
| comedians (LSD puts me in a silly mood). Some of them were
| even characters in books, and they were much quieter, but I
| could still feel their "grammar".
|
| The eeriest thing is realizing why the voices are there
| mostly during the come up, and then get magnified to magical
| characters like gods and aliens as the trip progresses. I'm
| convinced LSD exposed aspects of my conscious processing to
| myself, and these voices weren't part of some creative
| hallucination. That all of us, psychologically, are just
| amalgams of influences, of which the human sort are usually
| the most direct, makes a lot of sense. Still, its eerie
| thinking that those voices are _always_ there, just that in
| moments of inner cohesion they all work and therefore seem as
| one.
|
| And I will say, being in that state of such explicit
| awareness of self was beneficial. I could say "no, don't say
| that" to the voice that was saying "[morbid thing] was
| funny", for example. If someone thought like that all the
| time, I think it would be a disorder only to the degree that
| they wouldn't be able to communicate with others or whatever
| neurological overhead it incurs (maybe the brain needs some
| sort of central clock?).
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Interesting point you bring up on the "disorder" label. I
| usually tell people that are newly diagnosed and freaked out
| about it that the label in itself is insignificant. It's only
| a "disorder" if it's disrupting your life in a negative way.
|
| I have delusions, "magical thoughts", the occasional
| paranoia, and I prefer being alone. 95% of the time though
| those things don't cause any disruptions to my otherwise
| normal life. I have a wife, kids, and work at a FAANG without
| issue. I've had this "disorder" for over 20 years now and I
| only took anti-psychotics for maybe 3 months in the
| beginning. I'm on low-dose (100mg) Welbutrin to manage ADHD
| and minor depression, that's it. All that said, I've had a
| pretty successful and fairly normal life, so fixating on the
| "disorder" part of things is pretty much pointless. Saying
| I'm schizotypal is more about explaining to people that I
| think differently and observe my environment differently.
| ConfusedDog wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you believe souls exist? I have asked
| myself if it is possible that all living beings do not
| technically have been "assembled" before "shipments." A person
| is really just a conglomerate of low level functions (souls)
| that assembled based on genetics and environments. The soul
| disperses and recycled after death. Low level programs remain,
| data (memory) most likely not.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Saying there could be another one "person" viewing inside you is
| as absurd as 1 billion other inside you. As far as you are
| concerned you will never find out(disprove) and so it won't
| matter if it's actually true or not. Is also similar to saying
| there are ghosts all around us, can you disprove it? No. Do most
| people care? No.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| Related and very interesting podcast:
|
| Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence | Lex
| Fridman Podcast https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1KwkpTUbkg
| lysergia wrote:
| jeremiem wrote:
| Studies of split brain patients play a good part in illustrating
| how little our consciousness is in control in "Incognito: The
| Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman, a book I highly
| recommend.
| inphovore wrote:
| You are not alone in your own mind.
|
| Thought control is real and they are the enemy.
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