The brain, she be a weird beastie.

[telophase]

I've been thinking about making a post similar to this for some time, after a conversation rachelmanija and I had a while back. Now she's done it, so I don't have to. Except that I ended up doing so anyway, with a slightly different take on the subject.



It's about the experience and perception of mind and self. The fundamental conversation was about the question of: are we putting different interpretations to common experience, or are we actually experiencing different ways of thinking? Rachel said:

But that's something else that makes me wonder whether the line between what are generally considered to be (a few-- not all!) mental illnesses and quirky but normal thinking processes is merely whether or not the person in questions interprets "other personalities," say, or "I am not human" as metaphor or fact.

Is there really something very different about the mental state of Otherkin, or do they just interpret the very common sense of being different from everyone else, and the also quite common identification with non-human beings, as metaphysically real rather than metaphoric?

Is that also the difference between Walter and Sybil?

Rachel's interested in the line between sanity and mental disorder, which seems to be gathering a consensus of "can the person function in normal society? Yes=sane, no=mentally ill."

I'm a bit more interested in people who are able to function in normal society without outwardly appearing or behaving odd until you start talking with them or go read their websites. In the conversation with Rachel, when the Otherkin were brought up, I said I remembered reading a comment somewhere on Journalfen by someone who identified as Otherkin, who said (paraphrased; I don't remember the actual words) that he had always a fundamental sense of not fitting in and that he felt that inside himself somewhere he didn't fit what seemed to be the normal definition of human. Which struck a note of familiarity with me - back when I was in graduate school in anthropology, during a bitch session with the other students in my program (it was fairly small - about 15 of us), I remembered the old cliche that students go into psychology because they're screwed up and want to fix themselves. I asked the others if the reason they went into anthropology was that they never felt that they fit in, and they went in trying to figure this whole human thing out.

Every single one of us said yes. Which leads me to believe that a deep sense of not fitting in and not getting this whole human thing is, perhaps, a fundamental part of being human (although maybe not experienced by all).

But on the other hand, maybe there are indeed many different experiences of mental processes. What about identity? How far away from the SCA's 'persona play' is the experience of DID (dissociative identity disorder, known colloquially as multiple-personality disorder)? Or the difference between online personas and offline personas? telophase is slightly different from Stephanie, who are both slightly different from Tamara and Rannveig (my SCA personas, back in the day), but I do have a fundamental sense of myself while those personas are expressed more in behavior than thought, more like an actor playing a part. I can think as Tamara (my Romany persona) more than any other persona, especially when shopping (Tamara likes gaudy crap), but I never lose track of the knowledge that Tamara is a set of thoughts and behaviors I constructed in order to interact with other sets of thoughts and behaviors constructed by others.

I've seen people in the SCA, again back in the day since it's been over a decade, playing personas to an extent far deeper than I ever would. Someone once 'killed off' a persona that he was tired of playing (he created a new one) during an SCA battle (with rattan weapons, for those who don't know). At the feast that night after the battle, another person, whose persona had been blood-brothers with the 'dead' one, burst into tears of grief. Scared the hell out of the newbies my friend and I were shepherding around the event, because they thought he didn't know the difference between the SCA fantasy and reality. My friend and I knew that the guy did, because we interacted with him regularly, and that he'd just gotten deep into persona play, like method acting where you "become" the character. I'm sure there was a bit of actual grief as well, because it did mark the end of something, but it wasn't real in the sense that the newbies thought it was.

But where is that line? When persona playing or method acting, how does the sense of self change? Mine never did, but I'm also not very good at acting and improvisation - Tamara, Rannveig, and telophase are all pretty much Stephanie in costume*. But I knew people who were a lot different - a friend of mine once told me that her husband tended to interact with her as his SCA persona when he was barely awake and as himself when he was fully cognizant. (er, no, I won't tell you the type of interaction, but I'm sure you can figure it out ;)

* (telophase talks way more and is far more articulate, despite my lack of typing ability - I can't say anything without tripping over myself. And telophase is mostly what I call myself when I write things, with an added tendency to wank a lot more online.)



*reads back over it* I also think I lost my fundamental question in the big digression with the SCA, so here it is again: are humans who are considered sane (by the 'functional' definition of the word) just giving different names/descriptions/metaphors to the same fundamental experiences, or are we actually experiencing different patterns/thought processes/whatever?


So: thoughts? observations? random diatribes and arguments? I'm heading off to lunch, so won't read comments for a while.



Temporarily disabling anonymous comments, because I want to believe that everyone who comments will read the replies that people make to them and to avert some potential wank. :)

Comments

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

I really don't know. It's hard to say without being able to rummage around in someone elses mind and match up my perceptions with theirs. My psychology teacher once commented (possibly quoting or paraphrasing) that we'll never truly understand the human mind because you can't use the same tool to analyse itself with.

Personally I'm inclined to believe that on the whole people just give different names/ descriptions/ metaphors for the same fundemental experiences.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Eh, we'll never truly understand the nature of the universe, either, but that shouldn't stop us from trying. :)

Hard to say. I think in a lot of cases, we're applying different metaphors to the same experience, but OTOH it's hard to draw a line between people physically experiencing something in a different manner and those who aren't - take adrenaline junkies for instance. They're people who are less sensitive to the effects of adrenaline than others, so it takes more to get them to feel it. There is, of course, a bell curve of distribution of this trait amongst the population. I am most definitely way over on the "very sensitive" side, so that I can't get on roller coasters without sheer terror, and I do not enjoy them in the least. Which confuses friends who don't have the same problem when we go to amusement parks and I'm perfectly happy guarding bags on a bench nearby as they ride the coaster. "But we want you to have fun!" they say. "We'll take turns! You can ride!" I define "fun" as "NOT BEING ON THAT THING THANK YOU VERY MUCH" and reassure them that I'm having lots of fun while being overjoyed that I am not on it, but it never really convinces them.

Anyway, that long digression was - that's a difference in experience directly traced to brain chemicals, as is my ADD. But when it comes to things like Paul Broks (neuroscientist I mention in my next post) and the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who both characterise their thought processes as little men running around their head ... who knows?

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

You have a good point. :)

I'm a bit too tired to give this too much thought now, but I may come back to it tomorrow once my brain tries to give me hints and tips about itself through the medium of dreams. :D

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I look forward to your dreams, then! XD

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Short of EEGs, it seems like the only way to figure it out at all is to say, "What does it feel like?" and "No-- in more detail-- what does it feel like to you?"

I've asked this question quite a lot, in various contexts, and it's really hard to figure out whether someone really is experiencing something in a fundamentally different manner, or whether they are using different words to describe essentially the same experience. Part of the problem is that "What does it feel like?" is not a question that often gets asked in any depth, so people aren't used to thinking about it. Plus there's a set of stock phrases and vocabulary that get trotted out, which may cloud more than reveal.

I am fairly sure that "flow states" feel fairly similar to lots of different people, even if the activities are as different as martial arts and writing, because that's something I've talked about a lot and in depth, with some fairly articulate people.

But I am fairly certain that Jo Walton's characters have a "reality" that feels quite different to her than the "reality" that mine have to me. Or do we actually come up with them in similar manners, but then choose to relate to them in a completely different way...?

And now, with *correct* HTML!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've never managed to hit a flow state with any sheerly physical effort*, but I think it's the same state of hyper-focus that's common to ADD. I hit that with art, with coding, with Civilization III, and once or twice with writing.

Actually, not that I think about it, there are a couple of different versions of the state. There's a hyper-focus in which the rest of the world takes on diminished importance, to the point that bad headaches - my first OH MY GOD MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED migraine took effect during a Civ III game but I was able to push it aside until after I quit and went to bed - and hunger pangs can be ignored. Acknowledged, in the "I'll do something about that in just a second..." way, but effectively ignored.

But there's also the In The Moment spaces that come with art - usually I get one of those about every six weeks when I'm taking an art class, when every stroke I lay down feels right and I can almost see the finished drawing on the paper before I start**, or even when I'm doing something experimental, it works. And the other five weeks, I'm blindly hacking at the paper and it's a struggle through quicksand. I do have a hyperfocus at the time, but the hyper-focus where everything goes right and the hyper-focus where the rest of the world doesn't really exist are slightly different. They both feature the compression of my sense of time, though. (And as all artists and writers know, when I look back later at my work, I can't tell you which bits were done in the flow and which bits weren't.)



* Um, maybe not. I might hit it occasionally when washing dishes, for some odd reason.

** Bears little relation to the actual picture I end up with, mind you.

Re: And now, with *correct* HTML!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I don't think I perceive a difference between "no time passing" and "everything feels right" states. I'm not sure I get one without the other.

Washing dishes and driving can be sort of hypnotic, but it's a completely different state of mind. In that case, a repetitive activity facilitates daydreaming or mental writing or other mental activity which has nothing to do with the actions. In flow states, I am intensely connected with the activity itself, so that nothing exists for me mentally other than the activity.

Which do you mean when you're talking about washing dishes?

Re: And now, with *correct* HTML!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The "everything feels right" state happens with art, and it happens with coding when I can't write a routine that doesn't work (or at least the mistakes are immediately and obviously there and fixable). The "no time passing" hyper-focus happens with research, or with art or coding when the only sense of time passing is that I eventually get this weird antsy feeling that I need to stop this NOW but I can't*.

The washing-dishes hyper-focus state is a bit less like highway hypnosis and a bit more like Zen, in which I'm present in the moment and aware of what I'm doing, and not really daydreaming or thinking of much else. The repetitive motions add to that, because they're comforting.

(Note that it's a function of my ADD that even though I like that state, and I can get into it almost every time I wash dishes, I can't bring myself to wash the damn dishes without a serious provocation.)

* er, I've been in this state for the past hour, reading and replying to LJ, by the way.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

This is a placeholder to remind me to email you and Rachel later with my perspective on this, which contains things I do not wish to be publicly known on the Internet.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be cool! You have a very interesting brain.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Will await it! :)

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

Very briefly, before I go to bed:

are humans ... just giving different names/descriptions/metaphors to the same fundamental experiences

Yes, I think so. I've spent the evening at group therapy - it's a monthly thing, none of the six of us had met before, and all have very different life stories. And yet whatever we end up talking about, around 4 of the six of us will react with, "But that's just what I do / think / say!" We might start off with different examples of an experience, but it comes down to the same basic reaction after a few hours of talking.

or are we actually experiencing different patterns/thought processes/whatever?

Yes to that, too :p Starting from the same basic fear, we (being the six in the group) go through different thought processes, rationalisations and self-protective mechanisms. We end up *saying* that we want to talk about very different things, and use different metaphors & similes to describe those things, but it still comes back to the same basic drivers.

(I never could get that absorbed in a character, be it live action or tabletop roleplay. I sometimes get brief flashes of a character's emotion when wrapped up in a film or book, but the shock of feeling something *not mine* shakes me out of it.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Interesting... so it almost seems like there's some fundamental basics underneath it all that are common to everyone, but a layer on top of that which is more individualized?

(I was never able to get into any RPG character I played, although I was able to get more into characters I was writing. In the SCA, I'd occasionally experience the Moments that all SCAers live for, when the modern world drops away and it all seems real for an instant, but it was closer to my internal voice silencing itself momentarily, so I could forget all the mental baggage that makes up me and live in the now of the moment, rather than taking on a different internal voice.)

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

I think so. I'm only encountering the theories (it's Transactional Analysis, if you're interested) as they become relevant, but as far as I can remember there are a certain number of drivers that underpin everyone's behaviour; for example, I live by "Please Others" and "Be Strong"; others include "Hurry Up" and "Be Perfect". They're set in early chldhood, and the way I deal with anything that happens is in the context of them.

What interested me yesterday is that a group of very different people, all with different drivers, have very similar fears (the specific one I raised was fear of rejection), but we all react to it differently and in different circumstances. One person might be afraid of being laughed at when giving a presentation; another, if they get close to anyone; someone else, if tey stop being the clown of their social group.

I've been through cognitive behavioural therapy in the past, and that was interesting insofar as it was *very* logical and rational. TA, in comparison, deals much mroe with emotions and feelings, and it's amazing what similarities in the deeper levels of issues can come out regardless of the huge variety of rationalisations people can have.

[chomiji]

Interesting stuff, that Otherkin. It has that seductive feel - it coaxes me: "Yes, Chomiji, you really are a Special, Different Person. You know you have always felt damaged, and you open inside like a flower when you are under trees, and you can't help chirping back to the birds outside unless you make a forceable effort, and you always notice when other people are getting tense and uneasy, and that's why you have a love/hate relationship with the WWW/Net because you can't see people's faces, hear their voices, and watch their body language - which you do without actually watching them."

On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time trying to talk myself down from that position because it just makes it harder to exist in the usual workday world and I'm not sure how much of it is true and how much of it is a story that my mind tells me to make me feel better.

Do I compartmentalize? Hell yeah.

Do I think it's normal? Not really. But it was a great day for me when I discovered the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a/k/a Keirsey Temperament Sorter ... no, they're not identical, but they're close enough for me). I don't buy into it 100%, but statements I've read from people with the same profile as I have (INFP, if anyone else is into that) sound so much like me that I could have written them, and that made me feel a lot better. Maybe it's not a normal way of thinking in the sense of being possessed by the majority of other human beings, but there are enough people with similar viewpoints that I can stop thinking that I'm hopelessly "broken" somehow. (And oversensitive. And overly reactive to other people's moods.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

INFP is sometimes known as the "therapist personality" or "writer personality," because it's rare in the general population, but common in those occupations. I am one too, though close to the border on thinking/feeling and also extroversion/introversion.

My personality psychology teacher (who was also one) told us in the class on Myers-Briggs that she once went to a Myers-Briggs seminar where they had everyone wear tags with their type on them. She said it was a sea of INFPs, and she was rather disconcerted when every paper was greeted with questions about the implications from the INFPs, and methodology by the rarer INTPs and INTJs.

[chomiji]

The cognitive therapist with whom I've worked when things are not so bad and the psychaitrist who has me when things are really lousy both suggested that I might go into their fields, but I have almost no distancing mechanisms or defenses, so I think not. I get way too involved too easily as it is.

My own borderline axis on INFP is the P/J one. An earlier version of this site made me decide I was INFP. The deciding article was on "communications style" and said, in short, "INFPs inform, INFJs direct." I hate telling others what to do - I prefer to lay out the facts and let them decide. Unsurprisingly, I really loathed being a surpervisor!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I couldn't ever work directly with people. :) Psychiatry and psychology are fascinating fields, but the thought of a hands-on perspective wigs me out. :D

(Going to a behavioral therapist to work on my ingrained behavior patterns due to ADD would probably be a good idea, but there is no extra money at the moment, so I'm muddling through on my own. It's there in the back of my mind, though, as something to fall back on if I ever get to another crisis point like I had last fall.)

I'm quite happy reporting to someone and not supervising anyone else. I have enough problem figuring out what *I'm* going to do next without trying to figure out what someone else is going to do and making sure they have the skills and tools to do it and that they do it.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I am not at all attuned to other people's emotions. I am attuned to my emotions-- a difference the MBTI does not pick up on.

Because I have no idea how other people feel unless I ask them, I ask fairly often-- which, ironically, sometimes makes people think I am very empathic, rather than the opposite.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Half the time I am *over* sensitive to other people's emotions, to the point of reading way more into it than is really there. The other half the time, I am oblivious.

[chomiji]

Yeah, reading too much into things is a real trap! My poor INTJ husband has become very long-suffering about my saying things like "Are you sure that's OK? I can really go off and leave you for the day?" when he's already told me I can do whatever-it-is, but days so less-than-enthusiastically because he's tired.

[chomiji]

That's not the first time I've heard that complaint about the MBTI! I remember a rant from a woman who was infuriated that she was supposed to want to be a nurse (she had come up an ISFJ, I think). She thought that was a terribly depressing idea and wondered why the silly test thought she should care to become so involved other people's sufferings.

Being sincerely offered a chance to express one's feelings by someone one trusts is such a good thing that I doubt most people would worry exactly why you are doing it!

I can be very clinical about my own feelings, actions, and motivations, sometimes to the point that I really loathe myself because I feel I'm being manipulative. On the other hand, I guess it's only logical to want to disarm any possibility hostility in someone in a position of power (such as a boss) when you are approaching that person with a request ... I still hate it when I watch myself do it (compartmentalizing again).

I usually can't tell what people are truly thinking/feeling unless I get them to talk, but I'm good at picking up any kind of anger or uneasiness, no matter how someone is trying to hide it. It can be helpful in a meeting situation, for example - if I can, for instance, do something like "Hold that thought, Steve - I think Joan has something to add," when Steve has been dominating the conversation and Joan has been hesitant and is now getting frustrated because she can't make herself just butt in. ( I will be much more forward on someone else's behalf than on my own.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

...I'm not sure how much of it is true and how much of it is a story that my mind tells me to make me feel better.

And sometimes, if it takes you from nonfunctional to functional, that's a good thing. And if it's vice versa - as you said, if it makes it harder to exist in the workaday world - a bad thing.

One of my professors in museum school had us take the MBTI whereupon it was discovered that 3/4 of us were INFP. :) (I alternate between INFP and INTP.) She said it was more due to the way kids are raised in Western society than innate psychological traits, which has made sense to me - I don't buy into it 100% either, but I happen to know that my personality is such that I like taking personality tests. :D

I can almost see where Otakukin (http://otakukin.otherkin.net/) are coming from, I think. I know that I tend to become obsessed with a particular character because he or she either reflects something going on in my life, or something that I feel is missing from my life at the time (Sanzo has long since gone from being one of them to being a running joke XD). It makes me wonder if the difference between me and them is that I know why my brain latches onto a particular character and drops me into his or her story or drops him or her into my story, and that they interpret it differently - that they, at some fundamental level, are that character. Or if they're experiencing something different. The only post I've read about that sort of thing from the viewpoint of someone who's been there was more a folie a deux - the poster did not originally identify as otakukin and did not identify as such afterward, but got sucked into a shared delusion that had a lot of other bad psychological control things happening at the time. *That's* definitely a point where it's gone bad, no matter what objective reality is, because people were getting hurt.

Hm. I'll say it again: the brain, she is a weird beastie.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I never thought of it before, but I wonder if I developed very strong defenses against believing that things like daydreams, fiction, character identification, feelings of being alien and not like any other human, etc, had a reality outside of my own perceptions because as a child, people kept insisting that all sorts of (mostly religious-oriented) feelings and experiences and "visions" had objective, physical reality when I was convinced that they were completely subjective and probably imaginary.

I do often identify very strongly with characters, or feel very strongly for them. I just don't think the connection exists outside of my own emotions.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think I was naturally born a skeptic. I can remember arguing with my parents, at the age of four, trying to prove to them that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy didn't exist, and they were stubbornly insisting that they did exist, which was frustrating the hell out of me.

Mind you, at the same age I also thought that if I wished on the first star of the evening that I'd get wings, that I would, so I wasn't completley logical.

On a slight tangent, one of the people I knew in the SCA had done a paper on the SCA for a psychology class and did some interviewing and found out that most of the SCA participants had had childhoods where they were forced to rely heavily on their own imaginations for company and play - deprived either emotionally or financially, abused or neglected, etc. which explains why so many of them are so fucked up The hypothesis was that they were used to creating fictitious worlds and interacting in them, and found a way to join a shared fictitious world.

[chomiji]

The worst such situations I've encountered were when I did a lot of online roleplaying a few years ago. Many of the people involved were pretty good writers, and there were a number of really angst-laden scenarios going with heavy emotional involvement between the characters. It became very hard for a number of people (including, for a while, myself) to extricate themselves from their characters' situations. In most of those cases, the RPG interactions were quite definitely providing something that was missing otherwise in the players' lives, and there were many, many real-life conflicts, as well as friendships that crashed and burned.

I'm quite certain that manga are providing me with something I've been missing! But the remove of reading about it instead of "living" it in an RPG feels much safer. Even the enthusiasm that some of the discussions generate is providing a certain level of emotional intensity that I'm not getting elsewhere. As for indentifying with characters - Saiyuki is such a double whammy for me because the outer Hakkai (specs, domestic arts, politeness, deference, occasional completely off-the-wall comments) is so much the outer FTF me, while the inner Gojyo (messed up by messed-up mom, insecurity, dire need for affection, bleeding heart for sob stories) feel so much like the inner me. Of course they're a couple in my mind - how could it be othewise?

Acting and other assumed personas

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This is something I can't do at all, by the way.

An actor once mentioned to me that while he was playing King Henry V, the director instructed the other actors to treat him with deference during rehearsals, to help him get into character. One day an actor accidentally brushed against him, and he leaped up and almost struck him before he stopped himself.

This, of course, intrigued me. I said, "Did you react like that because you actually believed on some level that you were a king in that moment, or was it a reflex that you'd managed to ingrain into yourself so you did it without thinking at all, or because you knew you were an actor but you'd told yourself that you would act in character no matter what, so you automatically did?"

Unfortunately, the actor had no idea what the hell I was trying to get at, and haughtily informed me that he was an actor, not a delusional crazy person.

Re: Acting and other assumed personas

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I can't do it either, but I think I can do it a *little* bit. (er, if that makes sense.) I remember during the rehearsals for a play in highschool, where I played a cantankerous runaway, I was bitchier and got into more arguments with other people outside of the play during rehearsal and the run of the play. At the time, I assumed it was because I was a little bit in character, but I can't be sure that wasn't me just being a normal teenager reacting to the added work of a play while dealing with normal school, friend, and family stuff. :)

Re: Acting and other assumed personas

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

No. That sounds about right. When I play D&D my character seems a lot like me PMSing on a grumpy day and once I am in D&D mode it is hard to come out. So I will be more sarcastic and confrontational all day. (Or at least it seems to me.) But then I am also very easily affected my movies and music. If I listen to angry music, I get grumpy and if I watch anything with sarcastic characters I become more sarcastic.

Re: Acting and other assumed personas

[telophase.livejournal.com]

OH - I remember one acting exercise we did where the teacher played a therapist and one of us created a character with multiple personalities on the spot and played her in therapy. We were on the stage at the time, and the lights in the house were on, but not the stage, so she was backlit, and it was rather eerie. :) Looking back, she was doing a broad interpretation of herself for the main personality, and then a small girl for the secondary one, and was relying on "I don't want to talk about that" when she couldn't think of a response in character, but it was eerie all the same, because it worked as theatre.

[snarp]

I come down very hard on the "we're actually experiencing different patterns/thought processes/whatever" side.

My basic reasoning is that biologically, everyone's brain is, physiologically, unique; and we all remember some time during which our thought processes were not what they "normally" are - childhood, or being half-asleep/anesthetized/feverish/drunk/stoned/etc; and we can recognize, considering these memories, that our thought processes and faculties were not at such times functioning the same way as they "normally" do.

Knowing that there can be these types of differences within the way one thinks oneself from moment to moment, due to alterations in one's biology (some of which seem to be very small), and knowing that all people are biologically different, I can't conceive of a common human experience of thought. If I find that my experience of being inside my own head is radically different from what it was three years ago (and I do), then how much more different must my thought processes be from another person's?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

However, think of the body: we are all also physiologically unique in that sense, and people have a stunning range of common experience with the body, so much so that doctors can create groups of symptoms that point to specific malfunctions. Yes, there are differences here and there and people have idiosyncratic responses to pain and bodily malfunction, but there's enough similarity that most of the time illnesses present in readily identifiable ways. Wouldn't that argue for a general commonality of experience on the interior as well, with outliers here and there? Minor idiosyncracies tinting people's experiences, but for the most part, a general commonality?

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

I don't know. My uncle is now so deeply involved in the SCA that I honestly don't know if he has a persona or he's just...losing himself to the character. My husband definitely says there's a difference between the online personas I inhabited, but I'm not sure if that's true or that's his attempt to label, well, things he doesn't like, honestly.