Split Brain Psychology

Good questions and no they're not invasive, so no worries. Each day (and sometimes each interaction) the person acting as "me" is just one of the entities taking over, so effectively there's no central "me" at all if that makes sense. Today it's introverted family-man, but if we attend an event in the evening for example, the more social personality takes over and listens in on the conversations from family-man and others. Let's say the social one is currently active and sitting at the bar with friends having a great time, the family-man will say "we should text our wife and let her know we'll be home late" to which the social one may respond with "nah, we'll do it later" or "yeah that's a good idea, we'll do it now".

EDIT: to answer your last question about "equal access", we share thoughts and deliberate, but one can't exert control over the others nor forcefully take over. The active person at any given moment depends on the outside environment and what we decide is best for the situation, so it's kind of a democratic process; not sure if that can be defined as equal access or not.

Interesting point you bring up on the "disorder" label. I usually tell people that are newly diagnosed and freaked out about it that the label in itself is insignificant. It's only a "disorder" if it's disrupting your life in a negative way.

I have delusions, "magical thoughts", the occasional paranoia, and I prefer being alone. 95% of the time though those things don't cause any disruptions to my otherwise normal life. I have a wife, kids, and work at a FAANG without issue. I've had this "disorder" for over 20 years now and I only took anti-psychotics for maybe 3 months in the beginning. I'm on low-dose (100mg) Welbutrin to manage ADHD and minor depression, that's it. All that said, I've had a pretty successful and fairly normal life, so fixating on the "disorder" part of things is pretty much pointless. Saying I'm schizotypal is more about explaining to people that I think differently and observe my environment differently.

I've had experiences on psychedelics where my consciousness gets peeled back like an onion, with each layer being manifested by the drug as a separate voice. Things that we don't typically associate with an inner voice, like appraising some object or forming a reaction, became very explicit dialogues between influences in my mind. The loud ones were friends that I remember fondly. Some of them were comedians (LSD puts me in a silly mood). Some of them were even characters in books, and they were much quieter, but I could still feel their "grammar".

The eeriest thing is realizing why the voices are there mostly during the come up, and then get magnified to magical characters like gods and aliens as the trip progresses. I'm convinced LSD exposed aspects of my conscious processing to myself, and these voices weren't part of some creative hallucination. That all of us, psychologically, are just amalgams of influences, of which the human sort are usually the most direct, makes a lot of sense. Still, its eerie thinking that those voices are always there, just that in moments of inner cohesion they all work and therefore seem as one.

And I will say, being in that state of such explicit awareness of self was beneficial. I could say "no, don’t say that" to the voice that was saying "[morbid thing] was funny", for example. If someone thought like that all the time, I think it would be a disorder only to the degree that they wouldn't be able to communicate with others or whatever neurological overhead it incurs (maybe the brain needs some sort of central clock?).

That's an interesting philosophy. One of the personalities is spiritual and believes in souls yes. You should read "The Holographic Universe" if you haven't yet. It kind of dives into some of these concepts.

That sounds familiar - I usually say that I must be an idiot savant or something. But I don't really have the sense of an 'other' - I more think of it as a co-processor.

I think that's could be focusing too much on the "inner voice" and assigning that the "you" label. At least for me I have a normally chatty inner voice, and usually think of that as "me", but if I step back I realize there is a lot more to "me". There's other thoughts/knowledge/processes happening that can bubble up. At least my interpretation is the voice is just the aggregator, but there's really multiple systems coming together.

If I switch tasks and do something very creative, say playing music or drawing, the inner voice goes away and I can enter a "flow" or meditative state where things just happen. It's a very different mode where it's just feelings/emotions/imagery and no language based thoughts.

Also when I get really really tired, but power through it, I have a "recursive observer" where I kind of view myself on a delay and analyse everything I do, it's kind of annoying.

I had a weird experience relatively recently - I looked at a (coding) problem, and came up with an approximate (albeit buggy) solution, with no conscious involvement.

I looked at my answer, and didn't know what the hell it was meant to be doing - let alone how to debug it.

I went to sleep, and when I woke up fixed the bug with ease.

That sounds similar in some ways to (non-dual) awakening.

> This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both.

You know what, you might be right... got curious because of your post and went searching, then found out about OSDD-1b which is a sub-type of DID: https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd

> In some cases, OSDD-1 parts can be highly distinct and have strong independent senses of self. What separates these individuals from those with DID is that they do not black out or lose time. They may or may not have dissociative amnesia for aspects of their trauma history, and they may occasionally experience episodes of amnesia due to extreme stress or reminders of trauma. However, they do not experience memory disruptions between parts during their normal daily life. An individual with OSDD-1b has a subjectively continuous memory; different alters do not have different versions of their history for daily life because all relevant information is accessible to all alters.

Thank you!

Not familiar with it, sorry.

I'll give you a freebie edit, you can qualify it as the thoughts of an individual dissociative reader:

> Important to note, that the alters in dissociative disorders are not voices, in the classical sense of hallucinations, they do not typically present audibly. They are generally perceived as the individual's mind states (thoughts, feelings, preferences, and memories) from different points in their life. They present as internal thoughts and feelings the same way anyone else would think and feel internally, yet the language used by those with DID organizes them as individuals because the dissociation makes that easy. They are all still that individual even if the alters perceive themselves to be separate in that way.

This, I think, might back up your point more saliently than the schizophrenic angle anyway, but I admit I didn't read the article to take your point as once I saw you mention multiplicity, I speed-scrolled to the inevitable mental health/psychology section to see just how bad it was.

I moderate AskDID and used to moderate the DID subreddit before the mod team devolved into hurt people hurting hurt people, so I have some exposure to how the community perceives themselves.

Anything I specifically said about schizophrenia you'd like corrected?

I'm happy to make edits if I'm wrong (especially if I'm dangerously wrong!)

IDK what you mean by people who have had no trauma. This is the stupidest take on DID and trauma I see (that there are people without trauma), and I see it everywhere. Do you consider children growing up in a school system where they are taught to fear gunmen coming in and killing them traumatic? I do, and we have millions of kids in the US school system going through that trauma even if everything else in their life is perfect (it's not, life under the capitalist system is traumatic in ways most can't begin to grapple with)

Life is full of things that an adult won't find traumatic but a child who doesn't know what it is or how to handle it will, and THEN the core feature of the disorder is amnesia.

I will say it again. THE CORE FEATURE OF DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER IS AMNESIA FOR TRAUMA. And yet I still get chodes coming around asking me to explain why there are systems "without trauma".

A broken arm at 8 years old is traumatic just as a missed meal a the right age, say 2yo, is traumatic. Small enough to be forgotten in amnesia, but still significant enough early on for it to have affected the child. By the time you're an adult, neither are generally considered "traumatic" because we've experienced or learned of MUCH worse things. Trauma Olympics sucks and we should stop doing it.

Having your caretakers not be responsive due to money stress is trauma to a young, developing child. Later they have already dissociated and their parents got their finances together, so they were attentive and the child forgot. Did the trauma not happen?

Please don't pretend like everyone on earth makes it to adulthood without some form of trauma. It's incredibly ignorant of reality.

> 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?

Search your mind for why that is the first thing you go to, because it was the farthest thing from mine. You don't know what goes on in our head or anyone else's and it would behoove you not to guess at such. Much less state outright that I remind you of a dichotomy in an unrelated disorder because of this projected line of thinking.

> You seem to really not want people to confuse DID with schizophrenia, but why?

Perhaps because, as stated, DID is not neurochemical and does not respond to medication. Perhaps it would be good to differentiate between the neurochemical and the neurological disorder to prevent people who don't need strong drugs from taking them and suffering unnecessary side effects, which is a VERY common thing in populations with DID because of the misunderstandings of the differences between DID and schizophrenia.

Follow that thought process down the rabbit hole and you arrive, inexorably, at panpsychism.

Thank you for your response. The Islamic Sufi tradition is simply an advanced level of traditional practice of Islam--a superbly intelligent interpretation that never deviates from the core principles; both Arabs and Persians have contributions in this sphere.

Sheikh Farid-uddin Attar, resident of Neshapour (ancient Persia), mentions in one of his works (I translate, but it will not be perfect):

     "Don't let the self (your soul) become familiarized     with the Demons--
      for once you do, you become one yourself."

In the context of his poem, the Demons refer to the proteges of Satan who cause us to commit sin--the ugly side of the Human being. In other words, if you do something ugly, you will still have your good self, but also now develop a bad self; the more bad you do, the more varieties of bad selves you will develop.

Philosophic psychiatry (that blends religion with psychology, as suggested by Maslow) supports this view as well: recent (2011) paper on the New Unconscious confirms that humans are objectively good: our good self is always there. But when we deviate from this objective goodness, (to the degree that we deviate) we slowly face dissociation--multiple selves emerge as an after-effect.

Elsewhere Hakim Nezami, resident of Ganja (now located in Azerbaijan), writes:

  "O, Thou, from Whom the Whole Existence has come about!"

  "The weak soil, become able from Thy Mercy!"

While on the surface it may refer to how soil produces food per decree of the Almighty, it also refers to human beings (as we were made from soil originally); the reference to becoming able is in contrast to being weak--when committing sin and doing wrong: the bad self--while becoming able implies no longer being weak: developing the good self.

There can be more but off-hand this should do. :)