|
Self file pg3 [pg1] [pg2] [Directory] Faces aren't faces 'til they move-what the face says about the self read moreIdentification with the enemy-becoming the bully who controls you read more The curse of trying to be normal read more The detachable self-out of body experiences read more How an audience calls forth the self read more Self as the signboard for a center of gravity read more Why do we have a self? read more The mutinous teens and the lonely twenties-development of a sense of self read more The fear of dissolution-commitment panic, etc. read more Yes, there is a child within read more The hormones of self-the self is a matter of chemistry read more Changing one's mind versus changing one's self read more Boosting your self image read more Do animals have selves? read more Practical applications of the theory of self read more The evolution of the self read more Instinct--the self as a puppet of our animal past read more The extrasomatory extensions of self-why we can't just love ourselves, or psychobabble's bad advice-extracranial extensions of self read more The superstar as the ultimate outboard self read more From fandom to fanaticism-selves and in search of themselves make mind-gangs--subcultures read more The group as an outboard extension of the self read more Maps and the anchors outside the brain-how the extrasomatory cables of self jerk and waggle the brain's mapmaker (the topographic theory of self meets the extrasomatory model) read more Couplehood and the anchoring of self read more Couplehood-unleashing the hidden selves read more Getting a grip--practical applications of the theory of self read more How to become an empath read more The secrets of loving (or hating) your self read more Mandatory and elective selves-the self as suit and tie read more Passion points-imprinting and the primal self read more The buried others beneath your will read more The mystery of identity read more =========================================================================================
Faces are not things photos can capture. They move, Marie, and in the process they reveal more than just skin tone and bone structure, they reveal the real secret of a face--your personality. -------------------------------------------- In a message dated 11/05/1999 7:28:51 PM Eastern Standard Time, fentress writes: << Subj: Re: [h-bd]
Re: Philosopher Rorty sneers--personal hb: it sounds like the
humor which sometimes accidentally oozes out of high-stress situations,
when things go so totally awry that one is takne to a different level
of distance and suddenly sees the whole thing as a cosmic joke. Interesting
phenomenon, and one which could prove a fruitful subject for analysis.
I suspect it's the self's way of divorcing it's self from a situation
which has bone wildly out of control. Since the self is a story-telling
deceiver which falsely claims control over a myriad of internal and
external events, there comes a time when its only way to assert control
is to pretend that it is separate from the us which the fates have gripped
and tossed about intolerably. It's like the various forms of identification
with the enemy, in which we, the victim, are so utterly trounced by
circumstance that our only way to trick our conscious storyteller into
a sense of power is to pretend that we are not the helplessly stomped
ragdolls we really are, but that we are among the folks with power who
are kicking the bejeezus out of us. Or that we are among the abstract
forces booting us about. Hence the identification with the bullying
gods and destinies. We ally our sense of self with the forces of a sadistic
universe. It's that identification with transcendent tormentors which
allows us to see the cosmic joke implicit in our plight.
_______________________________ _______________________________ two very genuine out?of?body experiences. One came when I was still in high school. Though no girl ever agreed to go to any of the Park School dances with me (and, in fact, my schoolmates were horrified at the idea that I might one day show up anyway), the dance committee actually had the audacity to ask me to compose and act out a skit at a school assembly to advertise their upcoming Howard?less event. So I wrote a satirical piece of doggerel, made up a piece of music to go with it, and improvised a dance. I'd done a lot of acting back then, and usually had the lead in things (Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, Androcles in George Bernard Shaw, and stuff like that), but this was going to be very different, since most of it would be made up as I went along. As I was out in front of the audience dancing my head off (a pretty ridiculous spectacle, in case you've never seen it), an incredibly strange thing happened. I began to feel the energy of the audience focusing on me. Then I felt it coalescing into a single force and pulsing THROUGH me. Then came the out of body experience. Some sort of force far greater than I was seemed to take me over. I was no longer inhabiting my own body. I was merely watching, as if from the vantage point of a fly on the ceiling. I literally saw my own body jerking around below me. I saw the audience. I was particularly astonished to notice one girl who absolutely loathed the very air I breathed become utterly spellbound, her face overcome with some very strange form of awe, almost like a beatitude. As you probably know, I may have been elected to all kinds of committee chairmanships in high school, but I was definitely not popular. In four years, I was never invited to a single party or informal social gathering. But when the dance was over, the strangest thing happened. The audience, a mob of over 350 people, rose to its feet like a single mass and rushed to the stage. These people who hated
me lifted me to their shoulders and literally carried me out of the
auditorium and up the stairs to the building housing the classrooms.
Nothing like it had ever happened at Park School before during my years
there??not even to the captains of winning football teams. And in my
remaining years, nothing like it would ever happen again. By the way,
once they finally got me lofted into the air, my "self" had
mercifully abandoned its perch on the ceiling and returned to my brain
pan where it belonged. The second out?of?body exerience happened when
I was 20, living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, doing research at Rutgers'
Graduate School of Education (yes, I know I'd never bothered to finish
my freshman year of college yet, but the professor who took me in was
kind enough to overlook technicalities) and writing foundation grant
proposals for the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic. One morning
I got up and had a pain in my back. By the time I started brushing my
teeth, the pain had gotten sharper. Then it became more intense than
anything I'd ever experienced before in my life. Suddenly, I was down
on the floor, thrashing uncontrollably. My body, without asking my permission,
was whipping around in a horizontal position, as if someone with a giant
needle were trying to stab me from above, and all my reflexes were working
on their own to get me out of the way before the point could hit home.
Meanwhile, my conscious self pulled the old trick again. It abandoned
its earthly home. Once again, I took up my position on the ceiling and
simply watched what was going on with the thrashing body??MY body??
down below. The woman from whom I'd rented a room called a doctor, followed
his advice, dragged my contorting bundle of flesh into her car, and
rushed me to a hospital. I was going into shock. It was the attack of
a killer kidney stone. If she'd landed me in that hospital roughly a
half hour later, my chances of being alive today would have been close
to nil. So what was going on here? Some sort of compensatory reaction
in which the conscious mind moves over to let the unconscious take over
the driving wheel? A reaction which keeps the old consciousness busy
by generating the illusion that the familiar "I" of everyday
experience has been parked in some out of the way place, like the upper
corner of the room? I suspect so. << Subj: Re: the
"detachable self" hb: I've been mulling over what Denis said as well. There are many ways in which the self can become detached. In fact, very often it is an enormous struggle to attach it at all. That is, it is very difficult to get the self to see and genuinely feel the mass of our emotions. Though the self sees a world through our eyes, it tends to be quite blind to the feelings inside of us. It looks out the windows at the view but is imprisoned in its small apartment, often unable to go down the corridor a few inches and visit the neighbors next door. Out of body experiences, which is where we began, are something rare and strange. Denis seems to have far more experiene than most of us in dealing with those who detach in order to flee feelings which are all to ready to barge into the self's quarters. He seems to be working with those who've had traumatic experiences, and have been forced to set up barriers to block the memory. Sometimes this means fleeing into the strangeness of multiple selves. The mere existence of a coven of distinct selves in the same brain, each able to take over the body and impose its own mental, emotional, and physical settings, makes the question of what a self is all the more perplexing. It also demonstrates that a self has enormous power. Walter Freeman, in his Socieities of Brains (pp. 147-148) points out that each self is actually able to manifest a different disease. One personality will have asthma, while the others do not. Another self will have psoriasis, and a third shingles. When the self with asthma appears, the psoriasis and shingles disappear. What strange form of self-organized something is this which can manipulate aspects of the body using methods which it does not consciously know--in fact, methods which even the multi-generational mass mind of culture has not figured out? And how does it pull off such astonishing things when it can't even get a handle on such seemingly simple things as the moods which toss it about? Is it a mere a bit of exterior decor for these moods and body-settings--like the dorsal fin poking above the water, each fin different because the unseen shark beneath it is a very different being? But I digress. Denis is talking about a form of detachable self which dodges awareness of something all-too-ready to make itself obvious. Val and I are talking about out-of-body experiences in which awareness soars and we see things emerging from us which amaze us. Each is the opposite of the other. Each is a reality. And like most opposites, the two are joined at the hip--the hip of self. The trick here is to figure out what the coexistence of these contradictory truths tells us about the uses and evolutionary raison d'etres of the self. Val gives an extroardinary sense of the self which moves aside to let something else take over in his anecdotes. I suspect that underlying Denis' words is an equally vivid portrait of selves which are dodging something which they will not, under any conditions, allow near the controls. Or, to put it differently, one self steps aside to let something deeper and more certain emerge. Another frantically bobs and weaves in an attempt to block something whose emergence would be shattering. hb Vg: As to function, adaptation
& evolution I lean towards what Howard posted in response to your
letter. We appear to be dealing in the "detached self" with
a fundamental, extremely old, psychological adaptation, possibly an
ingrained mechanism that insures the smooth, uninterrupted application
of ancient pre-programmed motor patterns - when time is of the essence.
Zen in the art of sword play and archery is probably a deliberate way
to take advantage of this disassociation in order to gain a split second
advantage on the adversary. The disassociation allows for "regression"
to very basic probably innate motor patterns (instincts). However, what
gives me pause is what happened to my friend - there were two of us
involved in the bear episode I posted. My friend acted in an irrational,
and yet quite logical fashion - provided you knew something of his background.
At pains of boring you, let me tell the episode as it makes a number
of points. hb: which raises another question--why does cheating death exhilarate us so? I enjoy it immensely, and apparently so do quite a few others--bungee jumpers, paragliders, superstunting skateboarders, motorcycle racers, and a host of others. In these experiences we court the dissociation which removes our consciousness and brings that infinitely more assured motor operator to the fore. And, Lord, does it feel good. Among other things, it removes all the petty worries which normally plague us from one second to another, worries which can become as savage as piranhas. She - it was young female grizzly - rounded the tree, with great interest in it all, standing on her hind legs ever so often, but she made no attempt to climb (She could have! The tree was, unfortunately, such that small-bodied grizzlies can climb). At that point the question flashed through my mind "Where is Frank?" (here my disassociation ended). I look about, but could see nothing for a few long seconds. But then it hit me. I see Frank's head bobbing in the beaver pond. Frank cannot swim a stroke! Clearly, I had to hold the interest of the grizzly, and so I continued doing noisy antics. I think I descended somewhat to insure the bear would remain interested. She was, but then her interest faded and she turned and walked towards the next close by beaver bond and fiddled about on its shores. Well before that, however, I noticed that Frank, miraculously, had not drowned. In fact he had crossed one arm of the pond and his head was now bobbing in the next, deeper arm. When I looked towards him next, he had emerged from the pond and was running through the two foot high dwarf birches and willows - but not on two legs! he galloped on hands and feet, like a quadruped, albeit a rather clumsy one. hb: Here's another reaction which puzzles me. In my youth, I used peyote twice. Each time I felt I was receding back to an earlier primate state. And each time I discovered the advantages of walking on all fours. Doing this on a city sidewalk in Berkeley didn't in any way increase my mobility. But reverting to four-legged walking on and in the cracks under and between the rock formations jutting from the cliffs and beaches of Big Sug into the sea was another matter. Here, having one hand test the next bit of stone to see if it would hold my weight, then, if the probe indicated that it was safe to do so, following with my other three limbs, was a lifesaver. A single false mood would landed me in a sea whose fifteen-foot-high waves smashed mercilessly against the granite formations, and would have dismembered me on the razor juttings of the rocks. It felt as if the four-legged approach was a regression to a set of normally unused instincts. But was it? Or was it just something I'd picked up from an overdose of illustrations showing man evolving from the ape? Frank's use of the technique to escape the bear would tend to indicate something innate. vg: When I looked next
Frank had reached alone pine with a straight trunk that had no branches
for about 12-15 feet up. Frank tried to climb this tree with little
success. I shouted to him"Get your gun!" (Frank's truck was
parked about 300 yds off on the fire road). Eventually, Frank quit his
climbing attempts, and moving from tree to tree, glancing back at the
grizzly he ran to his truck, where he un-scabbard the rifle. By that
time I had come down, picked up our rods and fish and was approaching
the truck, from where Frank unleashed a fusillade towards the distant
grizzly. (His bullets landed short in the beaver pond, and did not spook,
let alone hurt the bear). hb: amazing. his self got out of the way, then blocked what had happened. Yours stood aside and watched in amazement, then recorded the experience. Is this an example of the opposition between Denis' form of detachment and its opposite? vg: When I pointed to
his wet clothing he accepted my explanation. When questioned why he
did not climb the spruce (the tree I climbed and for which he had priority),
He said that the tree was too small. In a message dated 11/14/1999 1:40:55 AM Eastern Standard Time, geistvr writes: << We appear to be dealing in the "detached self" with a fundamental, extremely old, psychological adaptation, possibly an ingrained mechanism that insures the smooth, uninterrupted application of ancient pre-programmed motor patterns - when time is of the essence. >> Here's one reason Val's
conscious self was wise to step aside when he was being chased by a
bear. Benjamin Libet's research shows that our unconcsious picks up
cues on what's going on a full half a second before the conscious mind
is able to wise up. Half a second in a life-and-death situation can
make the difference between giving after-dinner speeches about one's
adventures or attending an al fresco picnic as the main course. Howard Abstract A 'time-on'
theory to explain the cerebral distinction between conscious and unconscious
mental functions proposes that a substantial minimum duration ('time-on')
of appropriate neuronal activations up to about 0.5 s is required to
elicit conscious sensory experience, but that durations distinctly below
that minimum can mediate sensory detection without awareness. A direct
experimental test of this proposal is reported here. Stimuli (72 pulses/s)
above and below such minimum train durations (0-750 ms) were delivered
to the ventrobasal thalamus via electrodes chronically implanted for
the therapeutic control of intractable pain. Detection was measured
by the subject's forced choice as to stimulus delivery in one of two
intervals, regardless of any presence or absence of sensory awareness.
Subjects also indicated their awareness level of any stimulus-induced
sensation in each and every trial. The results show (1) that detection
(correct greater than 50%) occurred even with stimulus durations too
brief to elicit awareness, and (2) that to move from mere detection
to even an uncertain and often questionable sensory awareness required
a significantly larger additional duration of pulses. Thus simply increasing
duration ('time-on') of the same repetitive inputs to cerebral cortex
can convert an unconscious cognitive mental function (detection without
awareness) to a conscious one (detection with awareness). << GC hb: Glenn, I think you've hit on a critical word for this discussion--training. Basketball players, like Val's mountain goats and your horse, also make split-second tactical decisions, often decisions of enormous sophistication. But they are able to do it in large part because of years and years of practice. Practice builds a motor repertoire with which one can instantly improvise responses. The trick here is the difference between motor memes and verbal memes. Each resides in a diffeent portion of the brain. What's more, motor memes apparently have a far faster reaction time than verbal memes. This would imply that Val's response to the bear was based not just an instinct left over from the pleistocene or, more likely, the Cambrian and Jurassic. It also has learned components. Figuring out which are which would be quite some trick. It would also imply that under some conditions the verbal brain is muscled out of the picture so that the motor brain can take over without the obstacles thrown up by the verbal brain's quibbling and indecision. As for the separate cerebral
systems which handle motor and verbal memories, here's a squib from
Global Brain: Human and animal bodies pick up information from pressure gauges in the bottoms of the feet, from nerves which wrap the base of fur and body hairs, from sensors registering the vibrations of bristles in the ear, from the tips of neural fibers groping molecules in the nasal cavity's air, and from light detectors in the eye. All is funneled through the brain's emotional center--the limbic system--a leftover from reptilian and early mammalian days. There, instinct and personal memory set off elation, devastation, fear, anger, and frustration as internal signal flares. Should a batch of input spark emotional ignition, the limbic system routes the hot arrival to the storage lockers of cognition--the cooling vaults of memory. But not all storage lockers are the same. As I just implied, there are two radically different sorts of memory storerooms in the human brain. The first are antique caches inherited from the animals who came before mankind. They handle visceral memories, things we can't express and yet remain after they're through--the potent feeling of a joy or agony, or our learning to perform a feat of derring-do--doing a triple twirl during a leap, riding a bicycle, hammering a recalcitrant nut into giving up its fruit. These muscle-and-emotion memories are slid to the amygdala and slung under the canopy of the cortex where they are snagged in a curve of axons called the striatum. Extra information is packed away in the motor and sensory corridors, the cerebellum, and a widespread nervous system so out of our control that its very name--"autonomic"--comes from its autonomy, its stubborn independence from our sense of a conscious "me." A wide variety of animals practice wordless habit-stashing. It's the core of imitative learning and of body-memory. The result is the behavioral meme, a skill or a strong inkling well beyond the realm of human thought. Yes, we know how to ride a bike. But the finest rally racer can't explain the symphony of neural cues he uses to sustain a simple thing like balance. If we focus consciously on the angle to which we must adjust each of our vertebrae while slaloming through traffic at top speed, we are likely to lose the hang and scrape our head on hard concrete. Broca's area, the brain
enhancement possessed two million years ago by the Homo habilis known
as KNM-ER 1470, helped create entirely new forms of data cabinets, those
which house verbal memories. Verbal memes, the kind we can convey by
speech, the kind that our storytelling consciousness can spin into debates,
myths, tall-tales, complaints, or the instructions with which we teach,
take a very different route to memory. They slide back to the curved
prongs of the hippocampus, which flip them forward to the cortexes of
the temporal lobes, accessible to manipulators like Broca's area and
to two other verbal twiddlers which emerged in early Homo habilis--the
supramarginal and angular gyri. These are some of the processors which
piece together data for our inner voices and our blathering tongues.
They are the brain devices from which verbal memes are wrung. . Richard Dawkins. The
Selfish Gene. New York: 206. -------------------------------------------- In a message dated 11/15/1999 2:31:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, pithycus writes: << As I have always
understood the phenomenon, the out-of-body experience that Glenn--This may provide the key to another puzzle of the out of body experience. During my two rather unexpected incidents, I was on the ceiling looking down at my own body. To those who believe that the soul actually leaves the body, this is proof positive. To an atheist fascinated by the emotional reality, importance, and misleading nature of "spiritual" experiences, the consciousness or soul or whatever you want to call it by no means departs the cranium and flitters up to the acoustic tile. So how is the illusion of this vision--the clear sight of ourselves down below and our sense that we are above--produced? Probably by whatever mechanism gives us the same sort of clear visions accompanied by other convincing sensations in vivid dreams. By the way, this would indicate that you may be on to something when you suggest that out of body experiences may have played an important role in the early shaping of men's worldviews. When they are generalizing, anthropologists often say that the separation from our body and our seemingly free ability to fly over landscapes in dreams helped convince us that we had souls to begin with. The dream illusions of roaming gave us the impression that the soul could cepart the body and go off a wandering. Howard In a message dated 11/15/1999 10:48:40 AM Eastern Standard Time, he@ writes: hb: amazing, Hannes. However this thread has been creating the impression that we experience many forms of detachable self. Inescapable trauma may cause one form, danger escaped another, and high excitement yet a third. The auction would fall into category number three--excitement. Which leads to further guesswork based on Denis Donovan's evocation of the consequences of trauma. Inescapable trauma probably triggers the multiple personality style of self dissociation, a mechanism for evading awareness of a horrid memory or continuing fact. Danger escaped--as in the case of Val and the bear--leads to exhiliration and a good story. Excitement leads to--well--a stranger story. Now how does my out of body experience when the kidney stone pain was stabbing me fit into all of this? It was inescapable pain. But it didn't carry the social stigma associated with things like childhood sexual abuse. This would add yet another variable to the determination of which form of self detachment one might experience. The four would include: controllability, uncontrollability, social acceptability, danger, and excitement. Strangely, these factors are almost identical with the ones which lead societies and their members to undergo phenotypic changes. Val Geist proposed that animal groups swing from maintenance mode to dispersal mode and back--a pattern which recurs at every level of life from the bacterial to the mammalian Looking at human societies, I proposed something considerably more confusing, a quintet of phenotypic modes--fleeing, fasting, feeding, questing, and conquering. Unconrollable threat led to fleeing, the state in which a society's members abandon their social cohesion and become refugees. Uncontrollable threat accompanied by social unacceptability leads to something similar in individual psychology. The self shatters into several personalities, each trying to flee a core danger The relationship between individual psychology and mass psychology may not be as tenuous as af first it seems. Self is a social interface. The larger self of a society is a pointilist product of the individual selves it shapes and which shape it. When fleeing their core social group, individuals are undergoing a split of individual from social self. But individual and social self are so completely interwoven that the process has got to be traumatic. Or, to put it differently, a split in personality among numerous individuals simulltaneouslly can accompany a shattering of a society and the resulting flight of refugees, displaced from all they formerly identified with them-selves. On the other hand, controllable threat leads to fasting--the conservation of resources to weather the storm as a coherent social group. No splitting of self is necessary here. And so on up the ladder. Feeding occurs when a society has hit a jackpot of resources and its members to settle down and mine them for all they're worth. What effect this would have on the sense of self I'm not sure. Questing occurs when a socond generation is born into the rich feeding grounds. The new cohort of youngsters attempts to establish its own identity by challenging its parents' generation, questioning its values, rejecting its ways of doing things, etc. This is definitely a process which involves the self. Having plenty of resources but a need to set one's self off from one's parents is entirely a matter of self definition. And, as in 1968, it can redefine a culture. Conquering occurs when a society is besotted with power and attempts to augment its sense of control (and validate its personal and shared sense of self-grandeur) by swallowing other societies. The sense of self is involved here as well, though it will take a bit of thought to work out the implications more fully. To paraphrase David Berreby, the personal sense of self is a stitch in the social tapestry which stretches across continents, seas, and time, weaving thousnds of generations past together with those alive today and those not yet born. When the tapestry is tugged, all the threads move. When a single thread is snipped, its loss of strength threatens all the stictches to which it is attached. Self is the weave of society within us. Inner self is the weaver of society's exterior. Howard Ferdo--these are all good points. Self needs to be understood from as many perpectives as we, with our mere end-of-the-20th-century science, can muster. The harder we work at the problem, the easier it will be for following generations to get a handle on the process of self, a center-maker which is part of many groups, a rider of many squabbling neural structures, a creator of illusory unity in the chaos of diversity and change, a maker of internal dialog with the host of humans whose voices we carry within us, a creator of narrative with which we attempt to gain attention from those around us and ascend the social scale, a stitch in the weave of culture, and sometimes a weaver of new cultural embroidery. Howard P.S. On the subject of center-makers, we seem to carry a great many within us. As David Berreby's ponderings remind us, we are able to create ceategories which unite a bewildering variety of entities or actions into an archetypal commonality. Is the self merely one of our category makers and archetype creators? Is it just one more of the mechanisms with which the mind averages the scraps in a whirlwind of chaos, finds their common characteristics, and from the resulting heap of overlaps derives a fanciful quintessence?
hb: It's Howard butting in here. And the answer is yes. I've described my out of body experiences, which were alive with awareness, taught me new things about life, and stamped themselves luminously into my memory. I also dissociate when I'm hit with something emotional distressing. That is, my mind or emotional machinery tucks sn rmotionally painful stimulus out of sight within minutes of its occurrence. I feel the pain but can't figure out why. Recovering the msssing trigger is often impossible. And when I was young, I displaced the resulting emotions terribly. So this form of dissociation is the very opposite of the bright and vivid awareness highlighted by an out of body experience. Instead of heightened awarness, awareness is erased. My former wife of 32 years dissociated in remarkable ways, probably because of the trauma of being "knocked up" at the age of 19 (by her previous husband--who she was forced to marry due to the pregnancy), the humiliation of being a subject of what she felt was universal opprobrium in her hometown of 50,000 people in upstate NY, angering and upsetting her parents, being forced to drop out of Skidmore College and take waitressing jobs to support her baby and her new husband, all because of a bit of sexual experimention which didn't even involve penetration. The result was that few of her feelings ever reached the level of awareness. In fact, on those rare occasions when they came near the surface, she was terrified and did everything in her power to keep them from entering her conscious sense of self. The result was that on occasion she could be two people. One was the genuinely good and charitable person of whom she was aware, the person who controlled her words and self image. The other was an individual of enormous greed, shrewd tactics, and calculating cruelty, a personality only manifested in her actions, actions for which she unconsciously erected elaborate schemes which would guarantee her an excuse for carrying out her fairly ghastly intentions in a manner which, to her, seemed righteously justified and necessary. These observations are
consistent with those reported by Al Cheyne below. Both I and my wife
repress traumas to which we react in ways we imagine to be socially
unacceptable. However my two out of body experiences both took place
when my body was controlled by non-conscious forces within me, but forces
which I welcomed and which were in no way socially objectionable. Our
audience of internal significant others seems to make the difference
between erasure and enhancement of awareness. If it gives a thumbs up,
we allow the experience into our awareness. If it is so pleasing to
our internal audience that it will make a juicy story afterword, we
are doubly aware of it. However if it will cause the audience in our
heads to spurn and loathe us, our response is tucked under the carpet
of consciousness and hidden from our sight. hb: Al, your data is extremly interesting. My ignorance of terminology which comes easily to you must wear you out. But the Merram Webster Medical Dictionary does not give a definition for the term "hypnopompic." Could you explain what it means? experiences (HHEs) generally.
On the other hand, This is an extremely interesting approach. But how does it prove out in reality? The seriously traumatized, I suspect, detach themselves when something like their old trauma repeats. I'd imagine that their body freezes while their mind goes off into its own hiding hole, which means that they've not practiced for survival, but have reenacted and perfected an apoptotic mechanism--a self-destruct device. The adaptive value of such devices is to render those who have no power to deal with a situation socially ineffective, thus eliminating individuals who might lead the larger group astray. In other words, self-destruct mechanisms do not save the individual, but they do benefit the collective intelligence of the group. As Irwin Silverman very cleverly pointed out in one of his papers, "Inclusive Fitness and Ethnocentrism"--"though it may not sufficiently serve one's fitness to sacrifice for another who is perceived as sharing a coefficient of relationship of 1/1000, the gains from helping 500 such individuals may begin to approximate those achieved by nepotism." (Irwin Silverman. "Inclusive Fitness and Ethnocentrism." In The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism, edited by Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine. London: Croom Helm, 1987: 112.) Howard In a message dated 12/26/99 12:04:54 PM Pacific Standard Time, intarts writes: << Agree that play
need not be fun. An example par excellence that is P.S. If indeed individuals with post-traumatic dissociation disconnect when a crisis of the kind seared into their brains by past experience arrives, it would indicate that the amygdala is disengaging of the action-enabling clutch of the dopaminergic striatal system. Any brain experts in the audience with clues as to the validity of this supposition? Howard
However being forced to
display in front of those to whom one is subordinate and who resist
one's attempt to get to their level is another matter. This is what
one must do in parading before a peer-review panel, unless one has already
fought one's way into their club or, through nobel prizes and other
crowbars of fame, put the the peer-reviewers into a submissive position.
The hormonal setup into which subordinates are strapped leads to intimidation
and caution. Here we've got stress hormones inhibiting mental activity. hb: studies indicating the influence of an authority figure's pre-judgement on behavior would support you here. In one experiment, for example, aging subjects shown stereotypes of wise elders improved in memory, but those given visions of senility became more forgetful. In another, some African American subjects had to fill out a form indicating their race and others didn't. Those who'd been forced to pigeon-hole themselves as black did worse on tests than those who had not been reminded about their skin color. (Both studies are described in Wendi A. Walsh and Mahazarin R. Banati, "The Collective Self," In The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept, edited by Joan Gay Snodgrass and Robert L. Thompson. New York: New York Academy of Sciences: 1997: 206-207.). _______________________________
<<<<I am sympathetic
to the notion that my self may well be a spandrel. I am I'm puzzled by this. Everyone
seems to agree that primates are social David--this is a brilliant reason for a self--a representation of an invisible centering point, sort of like a signboard for the center of gravity of the zillion fragments which make up a galaxy. The center of gravity of a galaxy is extremely real, but may be dangling unseen and unseeable in empty space. Though it may seem an abstraction conjured up by physicists, it is, in fact, the pivot around which the entire ten million light years or more of galactic matter revolves. Is there a similar abstract pivot of the organism? And if a self is useful in representing it, how many organisms have selves? You've mentioned that having some sort of symbol for the coherence at the heart of the multi-trillion-celled, constantly changing cellular agglomeration we call a human is a necessity in dealing with other humans. It's a handle on the unhandlable which social creatures in particular need in order to keep track of where they are, where they're going, and with whose aid they are most likely to get there. However nearly every species on the planet is social--from bacteria to seemingly solitary cats. So which of us have conscious selves and which of us don't? Which of us have group selves and which don't? (Humans definitely have group selves--I am a New Yorker, a scientist, an American, a Jew, an atheist, etc., etc.) Is there some sort of self even in creatures which do not enjoy the luxury of consciousness? And if so, what sort might that be? Howard
What adaptive role, if
any, has kept evolution from pruning this >expensive parlor trick
from our repertoire. Even if it has no role, how the >heck did it
get there? Remember, when I say expensive, I mean expensive. The >brain
occupies 5% of our body mass but uses 20% of our energy. hb
<< >What I cannot
understand, as I say in the poem I posted yesterday, is why am hb: hmmm. I think you've
hit on something which could be tested experimentally. Val Geist managed
to scramble up a tree and outwit a grizzly while his self was parked
on a distant branch and left to merely watch. Our bodies drive us to
work while our minds--and hence our selves--wander off into the realms
of reverie, often seeming to leave the car altogether. But if we were
to remove the sense of self, what activities would we ELIMINATE? Which
of the daily deeds we take for granted would become impossible to us?
Presenting ourselves to others verbally might be one of them. Yes, I
suspect we could utter the usual mmm-hmmms during a conversation with
a mate which follows a well-known path and to which we don't have to
devote much attention. But what about giving a presentation to an in-house
committee, shepherding it through the internal approval process, then
altering the presentation to fit the psychological nooks and crannies
of an outside evaluating committee? Or meeting a new person of the opposite
sex and working like blazes to sense her character (or his) so we can
make a good impression? Would we be able to handle such things with
no careful shepherding of our squabble-prone brain-parts, no conscious
calculation mixed in with intuitive feel? Or, to use the words of Goffman's
title, would we be able to manage "the presentation of self in
everyday life?" Howard
Russell Kick and hb 2/22/01-rk: I considered myself a loner up until my mid- 20s, but since then I feel empty if I'm not in a committed, (hopefully) long-term love relationship. hb: me too. I'm sure your theory of self will shed light on this. hb: it's the extrasomatory extensions of the self theory. the thing about the twenties has to do with what "who am I?" and "finding your self" are all about. Rk: It seems to be a common part of getting older. As John Lennon sang, "When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way, but now those days are gone..."
It felt to me like a toxic
mental sludge had flowed like magma around the hb: wonderfully written. however I suspect that some of the toxic sludge was in you. in other words, i'm a very powerful and controlling personality. i tend to be like too much of a good thing, i overwhelm some people. maintaining the membrane-envelope of self is a difficult thing. when someone comes along who threatens to dissolve it, we panic and have to run like hell. this is what happens in romantic relationships which reach the stage where intimacy turns to terror and we withdraw. there's not phrase for this when women are the ones who pull away. but there is a name for it when men do the same damned thing--"commitment phobia." This need to defend our ultra-fragile sense of self also shows up when we return to our parents' homes and melt back into infantile torpidity. most folks have to get out of the hellhole of their parents' home in a couple of days in order to save themselves from utter disappearance as an adult. The place strips them of their sense of power and of individual identity. Susan Sively 6/15/00--As for my self-membrane, nothing gets through. I am a dedicated commitment-phobic. I dare to call it freedom. hb: it's a trade off.
you give up intimacy and gain a thick armor which frees you to a certain
extent from the awareness of pain. but usually the pain one tries to
hold back when one builds an interior container of steel is less than
one imagines it to be. like a demon tempted into the light, by day it
loses its ferocity. John??This is very meaty indeed. How did you receive my posting? Would you like to be added to our list? Below some comments. In a message dated 98?03?24
20:01:52 EST, intarts writes: Good observations. Further observations from psychiatry: many disorders that follow psychological trauma (PTSD, borderline personality d/o, dissociative disorders etc.) manifest both with (1) self?other boundary confusions, e.g. trying to get another to do what only oneself can do, and if the others accept the invite, then rebelling against the perceived intrusion by that other against one's one autonomy; FIRST OFF, THIS IS AN EXTREMELY COMMON MECHANISM IN ROMANTIC PANIC. I'M OBSERVING A CASE NOW IN WHICH A MALE WHO WOULD RATE PERFECTLY NORMAL ON ANY STANDARD PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALE (THOUGH HIS INTELLIGENCE LEVEL, I SUSPECT, WOULD BE HIGHER THAN MOST) FORCES ANY WOMAN WITH WHOM HE BECOMES ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED TO BECOME THE DECISION MAKER AND RULE OVER HIM LIKE A MOTHER. THEN HE RESENTS HER DOMINANCE OVER HIM AND ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. IN HIS MID?FORTIES, HE HASN'T BEEN ABLE TO SUSTAIN A RELATIONSHIP FOR MORE THAN THREE OR FOUR YEARS AND WONDERS WHY ALL HIS WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS HAVE TURNED INTO "ANGRY WITCHES." HE, OF COURSE, HAS FORCED THEM INTO THE ROLE. I SUSPECT HIS EVENTUAL WITHDRAWAL AND RESENTMENT UPSET HIS MATES AND SLOWLY MADE THEM ANGRY. TURNING TO SUCH PROBLEMS AS POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDERS, TWO MINOR OBSERVATIONS: THE AMYGDALA PLAYS A STRONG ROLE IN THIS DAMAGE; AND THE DAMAGE INVOLVED AFTER A SEVERE FAILURE OF CONTROL (ONE WAY OF CHARACTERIZING TRAUMA) IS A MANIFESTATION OF THE "UTILITY SORTER" MENTIONED AS A PART OF THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM MODEL OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN AN EARLIER POSTING. and (2) very intense intimacy?distance conflicts. The pain of traumatic affect seems to lead one to seek support over and beyond uncomplicated seeking of love and romance, but at the same time, to develop a demand for autonomy that's virtually inviolable as an antithesis to traumatic helplessness. LOSS OF CONTROL INVARIABLY PRODUCES AVOIDANCE SIGNALS. THESE ARE TRIGGERED IN HUMANS BY EMOTIONAL (HENCE neuroendocrinological) STATE. AVOIDANCE CUES??MANIFESTED IN HUMANS IN SPEECH, BODY LANGUAGE, AND MANY OTHER FORMS OF VERBAL AND NON?VERBAL COMMUNICATION??SERVE THE SAME ROLE AS CHEMOTACTIC AVOIDANCE SIGNALS IN THE "CREATIVE WEB" OR COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM OF A BACTERIAL COLONY. THEY TURN AN INDIVIDUAL INTO A MODULE OF A LARGER CALCULATING MECHANISM. Traumatized couples do better when they maintain a greater?than?normal optimum distance, so that the attractive pulls outweigh the distancing pushes. MY LORD, BUT YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR FINGER EXTREMELY WELL ON A BUNCH OF THE MANIFESTATIONS I'VE OBSERVED. THOSE WHO NEED DISTANCE AND FEAR BEING "SWALLOWED" OR "SMOTHERED" FEEL THEY ARE LOOKING FOR HIGH INTIMACY, BUT GENERALLY SOLVE THE PARADOX OF THE ROMANTIC ATTRACTION/REPULSION PROBLEM BY PICKING AN EMOTIONALLY DISTANT MATE, ONE WHO IS VIRTUALLY UNATTAINABLE, EVEN WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF MARRIAGE. I WONDER IF THE PEOPLE IN WHOM I'VE BEEN OBSERVING THIS HAVE HAD SOME TRAUMATIC LOSS OF CONTROL IN THEIR PAST AND BEEN SCARRED BY THE ENDOGENOUS PENALTIES EXACTED BY THE UTILITY SORTER. I'VE SUSPECTED IN WORKING WITH THESE PEOPLE THAT THEY CARRY SOME INFANTILE OR OTHER EARLY EXPERIENCE OF LOSS OF CONTROL THAT MAKES THEIR FEAR OF HAVING THEIR ENVELOPE OF SELF DISSOLVED BY CLOSENESS TO ANOTHER FAR GREATER THAN IN NORMAL INDIVIDUALS. I've hypothesized in a 1990 article on "the evolution of posttraumatic behavior...", that one of several evolved effects of the trauma response is to strengthen in?group enmeshment in defense vs. outgroups: HMM, SO WE ARE BOTH ON A SIMILAR TRACK, USING A GROUP SELECTIONIST APPROACH TO SOLVE THE QUESTION OF HOW AND WHY THESE MALADAPTIVE INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIORS EVOLVED. THEY EVOLVED, WE BOTH HYPOTHESIZE, TO INCREASE THE SUCCESS OF THE GROUP IN ITS COMPETITION WITH OTHER GROUPS. COULD YOU SEND A COPY OF YOUR PAPER? this is adaptive in stable but dangerous milieus, but dysfunctional if not frankly maladaptive in rapidly changing ones. In the latter, because of rapidly shifting alliances, greater selective pressure is given to the need for autonomy, making enmeshment now more of a threat, and increasing the likelihood of people acting out against it. I'VE COLLECTED A VAST BODY OF MATERIAL ON HOW STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURES, RANGING FROM HEAT TO NOISE AND CROWDING??THE KINDS OF THINGS WHICH WOULD INDICATE THAT A GROUP HAS EITHER CHOSEN A POOR ENVIRONMENT, OVERCROWDED AND OVERUSED A FORMERLY FRUITFUL ENVIRONMENT, ETC.-- PRODUCES THESE REPULSION SIGNALS. I'M ALSO WORKING ON A MODEL OF GROUP PHENOTYPES WHICH ADJUST TO DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS. THE FIVE POINTS ON THE CONTINUUM INCLUDE FLEEING (WHEN THE ENVIRONMENT IS EKED OUT AND THE GROUP MEMBERS SENSE NO POSSIBILITY OF CONTROL OVER THE CRISIS), FASTING (WHEN THE GROUP ENVIRONMENT IS IMPOVERISHED, YET THE GROUP RETAINS ITS COHESION AND GOES INTO A RESOURCE?CONSERVING MODE??THE MODE GENERALLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE k?STATE OR WITH WHAT VALERIUS GEIST CALLS THE MAINTENANCE PHASE); FEEDING (WHEN A GROUP HAS FOUND A PRODUCTIVE ENVIRONMENT AND SETTLES IN STUBBORNLY TO EXPLOIT THE BOUNTY TO THE MAX); QUESTING (WHEN A GROUP HAS BEEN SETTLED IN A HIGH?CONTROL, HIGH?INTERGROUP?STATUS, HIGH SURPLUS ENVIRONMENT FOR SOME TIME AND NEW GENERATIONS PRODUCE AN ABNORMAL NUMBER OF QUESTIONERS OF THE SYSTEM, OUTRIGHT REBELS, AND EXPLORERS OF NEW OPPORTUNITIES??THIS CORRESPONDS WITH THE R?STATE AND WITH DR. GEIST'S DISPERSAL MODE); AND CONQUERING (WHEN GOBBLING UP ADDITIONAL TERRITORY AND FRESH OPPORTUNITIES GOES FROM BEING THE BUSINESS OF REBELS TO THE BUSINESS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT). YOU CAN SEE THESE PHASES AT WORK IN BEE COLONIES, HUMAN GROUPS, AND MANY OTHERS. I'M CURRENTLY STUDYING HOW THEY WORKED OUT IN THE RISE AND FALL OF ATHENS FROM ROUGHLY 2,000 BC TO ROUGHLY 146 BC. Many thanks for your observations. They've helped me greatly in clarifying some of the points of the model on which I'm working. Cheers, Howa
gm: l will call my kid and tell her about getting in touch with Di. She is not doing well at all at my moms. lt annoys me because as much as my mom says she loves to have her there and that she lets her do whatever she wants and doesnt understand why the kid wants to move on her own, she is constantly complaining to me about her and Adria is going nuts. Why is it Howard, that my mom promises so much, opens her house and heart to us and then takes it back ? l dont get it. Do you think she is suffering from schysophrenia ? ( l know l didnt spell that right at all ). She says she loves to have my kids there and is always inviting people to eat over.But..........when its all over she says people have no heart and they dont understansd how she feels and that she is old....she is definitely psychotic ? Why is it Howard, that my mom promises so much, opens her house and heart to us and then takes it back ? l dont get it. Do you think she is suffering from schysophrenia ? hb: because we all carry all the stages of our life inside of us. your mother is reverting to the status of a baby. she is crying out for attention and love. the answer: retirement community where she can make friends and be surrounded by them. Howard
This outward turn of the self may be why we have an easy time figuring out the problems of others, but an insanely difficult time making our own choices and sorting out our own delights or woes. Our self, says the theory, evolved to send us into the arms of others, to turn us into data-sharers and antennae for the social group. Social groups that pooled brains this way, says the theory, would have outcomputed and outcompeted others. So those individuals would have survived whose selves best plugged them into the group mesh of minds, the parallel-distributed processing network of the gang. Selves that did the most to increase the collective IQ would have had the edge because their groups would have triumphed. The challenge has been to come up with research that would back this evolutionary hypothesis. Chances are that the study reported on below provides one microbit of supporting data. Studies on mice have shown that if you knock out the oxytocin gene, the de-oxytocinated rodents lose their ability to remember who's who. They lose a key networking ability. More important, to quote the Emory University press release about the study, it "demonstrates that social memory has a neural basis distinct from other forms of memory." Social memory has a separate neural swatch? This is a strong clue that the mind we've evolved to mesh with others may have evolved separately from the braintwists that handle food, follow familiar pathways, avoid the pounce of a cat, and handle the memories that fuel other basic survival tricks. One key to sociality is the self--the billboard with which we advertise to and influence others. Ergo, self may well have evolved in its own peculiar way, as a plug for engaging others, but not as a switchpoint giving us direct access to our own interior events. In other words, self may well have evolved to prod us into scurrying to others when we run into something exciting or confusing, not to help us dig a few inches back into the synaptic and biochemical tangle that makes emotions pop and figure them out on our own. Which, in turn, would mean that self, of all the absurdities, is an outsider in the skull-it may be among the first to feel the pain but it's often the last to be told why. The self may well be an exile living in the cranium, one that needs other selves-other exiles-to survive. Does anyone else know of work that would support or negate these ideas? Howard p.s. Oxytocin is the big-time
social glue-it's the hormone most involved in bonding us to each other.
Other aspects of the theory of self I've been working on boil down to
one thing-self is others. Oxytocin is what ropes us to others. So the
connections all make sense. Or the sense all makes connections. Social
connections, that is. |
