Parallel distinct structures in dissociative identity disorder

Miscellaneous
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Out on a limb here, I will say that all mental disorders are the result of network abnormalities we don’t yet understand. Particularly major depressive disorder. Eventually autism will be considered a “thinking style” like dyslexia is now seen to be.

But the really interesting part is how DID is parallel structures each with less than a full personality.

Neurology and Psychology from this research as well when it’s informed by the knowledge of how the network is supposed to work.

I seem to remember Hawkins saying that the reason that when there’s a group working on theory and another on how to apply it, like in medicine, physics, etc a feedback loop forms and accelerates the progress of both. That was why the theoretical neuroscience field needed to be created.

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My only criticism of this is that they are seeing the problem as a top down effect and I don’t think they realize it. To say it’s protective like saying a shattered knee cap is protective. To say it’s defensive is ludicrous too for the same reason. It’s the best thing the brain can do when neural development gets disrupted at that stage. And the association of the parts of the personality can be completed later in life, at least well enough to live a normal life because everything about being a human is learned. With feedback on the progress of something the brain is trying to do, like with “send a message to the brain stem and wonder what just moved”, the brain will make the associations if it has the opportunity and feedback can tell if it’s getting close. I improved my guitar playing by always recording and them just listening without trying to figure out anything, and my brain did the rest because there was feed back you can’t get while playing being all your attention is on playing. We can learn amazing things and we’re not even aware it’s happening.

That is also the basis of DBT, helping the brain to learn to manage it’s emotions. That’s partly why it’s so successful, and the other is that it was created by a woman and every facial hair aficionado needed to try to prove her wrong, so it’s the most tested therapy there is, and works for multiple difficulties, including PTSD and behavioral problems from TBI. As a behavioral therapy it (rightly so) views cognition as behavior that can be modified, and in the case of DBT, that learning is a cooperative effort between an indivudual and a group and with an individual counselor. It’s amazingly powerful.

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FWIW, there are a number of excellent stories and novels whose protagonists have DID (aka MPD) and other conditions. In some of them, at least part of the story is told in the first person(s). Here are a few I recall:

Alfred Bester

Daniel Keyes

  • Flowers for Algernon
    (The novelette version has more impact than the novel, IMHO;
    I’ve never had the nerve to watch the movie.)

Robert A. Heinlein

Shirley Jackson

Maybe someone should write a story from the perspective of a Monty system with DID…

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DID is the new name for MPD, I’m guessing largely because they realized there’s just one poorly associated personality, and the active personality(ies) are incomplete parts.

I bring it up here because it means that Monty can support a hivemind. If the brain can do it, Monty can do it. When working on solving a problem, it could in effect be the equivalent of a brainstorm session. It also means one part of Monty - and a “part” isn’t a mechanical thing, it’s like in a play, a role - one part can be monitoring several very complex things that are very different and not get them tangled up keeping track of them, especially if they’re not related. It could then associate the new information into the full model of the world, and then all of the system will have access to it.

In a human, the source is an accident that creates a vulnerability, and DID doesn’t doesn’t actually “break out” until later in life if stress continues to be too much for the brain to finish the job it started. The brain really is insanely durable. Like the research on HTM networks where up to 70% of the network can be damaged and still function. It appears usually around 12 to 16, and if you make it to 20 without it happening, it won’t. The switching happens in response to emotions and stress, and it works the same way reflexes do. Which means the location of the damage is in the old brain, not the cortex. It’s not always instant, and it can take days or weeks to complete the process. Biology works methodically like that​:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I’ve looked at everything brain related through the lens of the implications what Jeff found in the couch cushions at the library, ever since the HTM paper came out. I didn’t read On Intelligence until after that. Being able to suddenly become aware of being somewhere and instantly begin making enough sense of the world with the information you have to act as if nothing happened is so Monty. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Because memory is stored in the structure of the network, a part has - wait for it - a complete model of the world from the “point of view” of the part. The sharing of memory is is messy and not well understood, but basic things are obviously shared. When the disruption happens it is during the period where we learn how to be a person from our caregivers. A huge part of that is learning to manage our emotions. Disruption at that stage prevents the completion of that, and under high stress and strong emotions, it switches to “a different solution”.

As Jeff has pointed out, consciousness is a tool that brains use to solve problems, and brains are extremely good at solving problems. In Psychology the point of view is top down, and everything in the Universe is built bottom up. It wasn’t even a science until the 90s, it was dudes with beards who wrote eloquently before that. The brain was interrupted while it was in the process of learning to be a human being. Memory is organized by association, and the name of the disorder is misleading because, and I say this all the time - Science has been controlled by men, and they come up with some really stupid ideas based on their ideas about manliness applied to everything they do. It’s annoying. The disorder is a lack of association. You can’t dissociate two things that aren’t associated.

The emotional system is a black box just like the motor controls for movement. The brain didn’t finish learning how emotions works before self-awareness during, you guessed it - the sensorimotor learning stage of human development - and it was way too busy to come back to it right away as any parent of a 3 yr old knows. Things to do, places to be. The reason human development takes so long is because being a human is complicated and it takes a couple decades at the speed of biology to “complete the process” That won’t be the case with Monty. Evolution finds the cheapest solution it can. Low budget. It only needs to provide a .01% improvement in survivability to become dominant over time. It only occurs “in utero”. Once you’ve been born, that’s when the results of the changes are tested against reality. That takes a long time, and the results are the cheapest things nature can build that is still functional. Which is amazing all by itself that all of life on earth could all arise from almost nothing. Just dirt and water plus energy, and billions of years of time. Wild.

What we’re doing now is that “in utero” stage of development for Monty, and we can make mistakes faster than nature, while not repeating mistakes and cloning the good ideas as as we go. Once a module to manage Multiple Montys (they would all be complete, because there’s no personality) is created, any Monty could use it to reconfigure itself as needed depending on the problems it is working on.

If the brain can do it, Monty can do it.