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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to really not want people to confuse DID with schizophrenia, but why? Because DID suffers are innocent victims who deserve sympathy for their trauma while schizophrenics are just born mental and don't deserve such good treatment?
You remind me of those people who get angry about type 1 and 2 diabetes. One is the sufferer's own fault and the other is innocent people who deserve to be seen as higher status.
>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.
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.
> 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
2nd paragraph of the wikipedia article says that although mostly caused by trauma, "Genetic and biological factors are also believed to play a role."
So i'm not sure you can claim that there is for sure no neurochemical basis. Seems like we don't understand it well enough to make that claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a concept in Tibetan thought that there can be independent "power centers" (for lack of a better term) in the mind. They might warp the personality of the "host". They might sometimes grow out of control.
This is my superficial understanding anyways.
And now that I think of it, it sounds a bit like Videodrome.
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.
the author of this blog is mentioned the mystic aspects of all major religions except Islam; was it done out of ignorance or intentional neglect? It's difficult to guess. But it surely does point out an important issue when an "article" is presented:
how do we know what is withheld, what is presented incorrectly? whether intentionally or not, it surely does point out the blind spot of unknown unknowns--and if readers know less than writers, then readers will never be able to fathom what was withheld.
For instance, he mentioned Gurdjieff but Ibn Arabi was the giant of Mysticism--and continues to remains so to this day.
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.
[+] [-] y-c-o-m-b|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kgeist|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] walleeee|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] plutonorm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ConfusedDog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sexy_panda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoten|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MAMAMassakali|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xerox13ster|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] superb-owl|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sacrosancty|3 years ago|reply
You remind me of those people who get angry about type 1 and 2 diabetes. One is the sufferer's own fault and the other is innocent people who deserve to be seen as higher status.
[+] [-] Silverback_VII|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aordano|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
2nd paragraph of the wikipedia article says that although mostly caused by trauma, "Genetic and biological factors are also believed to play a role."
So i'm not sure you can claim that there is for sure no neurochemical basis. Seems like we don't understand it well enough to make that claim.
[+] [-] TheJoYo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsedlm|3 years ago|reply
traumatized people passing on their traumas. some very clever powerful persons using traumatized people like they use other tools and instruments.
[+] [-] djmips|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninesnines|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] csours|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bathMarm0t|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breck|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Malic|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
[+] [-] Daniel_sk|3 years ago|reply
Jeff Hawkins: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1KwkpTUbkg
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] euroderf|3 years ago|reply
This is my superficial understanding anyways.
And now that I think of it, it sounds a bit like Videodrome.
[+] [-] jeremiem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wawjgreen|3 years ago|reply
how do we know what is withheld, what is presented incorrectly? whether intentionally or not, it surely does point out the blind spot of unknown unknowns--and if readers know less than writers, then readers will never be able to fathom what was withheld.
For instance, he mentioned Gurdjieff but Ibn Arabi was the giant of Mysticism--and continues to remains so to this day.
[+] [-] superb-owl|3 years ago|reply
I'm unaware of any Islamic mysticism that specifically discusses multiplicity of self - any tips?
[+] [-] m3kw9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inphovore|3 years ago|reply
Thought control is real and they are the enemy.
[+] [-] lysergia|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]