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Re: Fructured minds
« on: 2003-09-16 00:13:48 » |
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This article attempts to shed some light on where consciousness comes from, by examining multiple personality disorders. It is from NewScientist Print Edition, not available online at the moment, so I posted it on the BBS here:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=3&action=display&threadid=29267
Fractured minds
by Rita Carter
New Scientist, vol 179, issue 2412, 13 September 2003
It's hard to know who you are when there are several distinct personalities inside you, or if you feel detached from your own body. Rita Carter asks what these strange conditions reveal about our sense of self
<snip>
John and his friends don't just share a house, though. The arrangement is much more intimate. They share a body. Each of them is a personality - an "alter" - in what they call the "system" known publicly as John. Were they to come to the notice of a psychiatrist, John would almost certainly be diagnosed as having dissociative identity disorder, the strange condition more commonly known as multiple personality.
We all have conflicting thoughts and feelings from time to time. We experience mood shifts, and have ideas and desires that change from moment to moment. Nevertheless, we mostly experience ourselves as a single, solid and continuous "me". Why do we feel this way? Where does our sense of self come from? And why is it different for people who experience multiple selves?
We take the feeling for granted, yet our "normal" sense of being a self anchored in one particular location and time, the concrete "me, here, now", is a creation of our brains and thus more fragile than it may seem. A slight shift in the way the brain processes information may destroy the comfortingly familiar feeling of being a single, continuous being.
The states of mind that most commonly disturb our sense of self are known collectively as dissociation. They range from vague feelings of "spaciness" to bizarre conditions such as multiple personality disorder and "fugue" - the sudden loss of personal memories. Some psychiatrists consider the symptoms of the weirder dissociative states to be fictitious - a form of "acting out" rather than an involuntary response to altered brain function. But recent evidence from brain scanning studies is not only giving these conditions credibility, it is beginning to reveal how our sense of self is generated.
Normally, certain cognitive faculties - memory, self-recognition, consciousness, sensation, intention and action - are bundled together, giving us a sense of singular and continuous identity in a single stream of experience. In multiple personality and other dissociative states, these strands of "self" are experienced separately.
People with multiple personalities have several distinct states of mind, each of which has the habits of thought, emotions and memories of an individual personality. Some, like the John system, share awareness of one another - so-called "co-consciousness" - rather like the common dream experience of being both the observed and the observer. "When one of us is in charge of the body the rest of us are sort of there in the background," John says. "We can't actually do anything, but we see what is going on, we are aware of what the one who is 'out' is thinking, and we see everything through their eyes."
Multiple personality disorder shows how important our personal memories are to our sense of who we are. In people with the condition, memories of events that occurred when one particular alter was in charge of the body are "claimed" by that personality, so when another alter appears these events feel as though they happened to someone else.
In John's case each alter knows the others' memories, but they do not experience them as their own. They can therefore "fake" being a single personality and their strange inner life may go undetected. In a few rare cases, though, like those portrayed in the films The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, the personalities are so cut off from one another they do not even know of the others' existence. Each alter is able only to retrieve their own memories, so they all have "gaps" in their lives when it seems they did not exist.
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