[HN Gopher] Split Brain Psychology ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-13 23:00 UTC)