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. :)