triminded.com

I have Googled my way to Robert Ornstein’s “Multimind”.  This is an important correlation.

I was looking to see if the domain multimind.com was available, as I have come to think of my own mind as being much as Mr Ornstein describes, at least in the foreword to the book.  I haven’t got a copy yet.

In short, each person has two or more dominant personas that are the consequence of nests of neural networks that fire up together and create an aggregated computation effect.  So Berne’s “tri-mind” is better thought of as an arbitrary plurality, depending on how the person developed their mind in childhood etc.

I had spent a busy last few months thinking intensely about the synergy of neuroscience, computer science and Eric Berne.  Consequently I had come to the conclusion that, although Berne’s Parent Adult Child has some good grounds for credit, the mind is far more granular than that.  The effects he was describing are much better described by reference to sets of task-specific processing zones in neural groups, spinning up together in response to stimuli so as to create a nest of computational and informational transfer effects.  Emotions are one of these informational elements.

I have large blocks of text that I committed to my iPhone’s notepad and to conversations with a confidant on facebook, prior to this reference being found, so I will try to sweep that together to capture a snapshot of what I thought of all this prior to reading any more of Mr Ornstein’s theory.  I am very excited to find an existing authoritative reference that mirrors more of my thoughts.  It is welcome to think that I am not adrift from respected science that far that I am alone!  First I want to try to distinguish what had resulted from my own battle to describe my mind.  Then I will enjoy reading what a fully educated mind makes of what seems to be the same topic.

I don’t see a need to apologize to people with rich metaphysics views that my approach attributes all the activity of the mind – thought and feeling – to neuron bundles acting together in huge combinations to produce an aggregated phenomenon that we call a personality. I have already heard a strong complaint that this approach extinguishes the idea of a soul that can persist beyond the flesh (a fundamental tenet of religion), and that the idea of a mind that is entirely attributable to neuroscience is a fundamentally atheistic philosophy. I disagree. There is already so much in religious philosophy aside from this that requires an entirely transcendent explanation that this element also requiring one does not significantly alter the overall quantity of a-scientific thought required to keep a rich metaphysical framework flying.
Therefore I see a complete Cognitive Neuroscience explanation of the mind as being unconflictory with any well-examined metaphysical framework. The entire experience of a human life may be found to have purely physical containments, but a rich metaphysical philosophy is still well able to expect a transcendent experience to also occur alongside this, both after and even during life.
There is a flavor in science that almost seems to delight in finding purely physical explanations for life “because it disproves God”, but this extrapolation is nonsense to a rational mind. Nothing can disprove deity nor prove deity, short of a deity presenting itself for examination and being found to be so or not so. Therefore a rational mind separates the topic of deity into the field of speculative metaphysics and lets those inclined to spend their resources in pursuit of deific matters do so in peace. While similarly a well-minded metaphysician leaves the examination of physics and microbiology to scientists. In between those two, lives a particular kind of person who tries to faithfully comprehend the correlation and abrasion between the two disciplines and produce some kind of explanation that marries and yet distinguishes them without ruining either.
So I propose that the religious have nothing to fear from Neuroscience, nor do Neuroscientists show themselves to be using their frontal lobes if they are bothering trying to snuff out God through neuroscience. Really that is little more than a childish game along the lines of My Metaphysics is Better Than Yours. Berne from the 70s.

So I’ve tumbled onto the term Cognitive Neuroscience now. This appears to capture many areas of the kind of amalgamation of thought that I’ve journeyed through over the last year.
Many of the elements of my approach appear in CN fragments. This is encouraging, to know that there is some established foundation to what I’ve worked through.
Probably there are now some ways in which I can start to summarize the key elements of my approach in ways that make some sense within established psych frameworks.
One is that I part from Jung, in that I see no justification for elevating the rational mind to the status of being a person’s authentic identity leaving all other manifestations of the mind as being personas, masks, inauthentic adaptations. If the rational mind (Berne’s Adult) arises from one particular subset of neurons, that in no way makes it any more “the true person” than a deeply affected Child-mind, which is also just a personality arising from another subset of neurons.
This is a profound point. “Personas” are therefore not masks over a “true identity” but philosophical peers with it. The rational mind (Jung’s Identity, Berne’s Adult, Freud’s Ego) is certainly a more agreeable sub-mind for a psychologist to negotiate a patient’s life reform with, but that doesn’t logically elevate it to a status of higher authenticity of identity!
My proposal is that all the personality manifestations that emit from a single physical person are truly “of that person” and the one physical person is responsible for them all equally. I’ll look further into Gestalt theory to see how much of its ideas parallel these thoughts.
A consequence of this is that it is philosophically an imposition upon a person to insist that they conduct their life from the rational mind. Even though that may be an optimally functional way to live life (as I have found), it is still an unfair imposition to make upon another person. Consider: “To be an authentic Person, you must use neuron set A, rather than neuron set B.” No, I can’t see that making rational sense based on CN.
So my key proposal is that a person shifts to a responsive sub-mind based on their environmental circumstance, mostly involuntarily, and emits a personality that has been developed over the course of their life within that particular sub-mind.
What I have thus developed is an ability to identify and intercept this involuntary switching of sub-minds and then, if required, impose a second voluntary switch to a sub-mind of my own choosing more befitting to the circumstance of the moment.
All in all, this could be trivialized as a “recipe for self control”. And it may be as little as that. Nevertheless for a person whose life has been blighted by a deep lack of self control and involuntary childishness this is a golden technique that I covet.
I don’t expect people who naturally developed self control effectively to connect with what I’m saying much. They would not have suffered the deep wounds of an uncontrollable self and probably have a very stable and safe selection of sub-minds. So a stable-minded person reading this may find it very hard to catch why this is so valuable an experience.
I have more thoughts on this, but that’s a fair start for now.

It’s been a busy year.

Fortunately I’ve managed to keep the train on the rails.

In the meantime I’ve read a bit on neuroscience and drawn some new conclusions on how this multi-mindedness might be formed on the back of lobe-switching, neurone sets, connectomes and neuroplasticity.

I now perceive the mind not to be so distinctly tri-part, Parent-Adult-Child or Id-Ego-SuperEgo, but rather a mass of logic and memory bundles that are aggregated into a short list of sub-lobes which switch on and off in set combinations, producing the personality nuances that Berne and Freud described as tri-partite ego-states, and that Jung described as Personas, Anima and Identity.   The experience that I have gone through now seems readily explained by the neurological concept of these lobes switching involuntarily in response to a life-situation.  In doing so, this switching producing a distinct personality (Jung’s Persona, Berne’s Child, Freud’s Id) which in turn loses access to some rational resources (memories and logic) yet still retains access to other memory and logic resources and is therefore able to still think in response to the life-situation, but only in a limited way.

This post is just to revisit this blog and wake it up.  I’ll write some thoughts and put up some new material in the next few months.

Hi.

I’ve just received a copy of Muriel James’ “Born to Win” and really most of what I went through last year is described clearly in her book.  I’ll spend some more time looking through it and make some more comments later.

It’s kind of affirming seeing a professional psych cataloguing 40 years earlier what I thought to be a great discovery now.  At least it means I’m not dreaming this stuff up.

As noted to another, it’s like boldly climbing a mountain imagining you’re the first ever to tread this path and finding the flags of many past climbers already on the peak.

I have thought a lot about the people around me, and whether they act in a balanced state of mind, sharing the ego-states equally and appropriately to the situation presented to them (what I am calling trimindedness, until someone corrects me with the right psych term).

I’ve also noticed some outstanding examples of this trimindedness in literature.

There is an outstanding Italian movie called “La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful)” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful ] in which the character Guido Orefice protects his son from Nazis by surrounding him in the pretense of a game explaining the Nazis’ presence.  The magic of this movie is the way in which Guido continues this pretense under astonishing pressure.  In Guido I recognize someone letting the Child ego-state loose in a completely controlled and sensible way, while also enabling the Parent ego-state in glimpses as needed, and all the time his Adult ego-state is measuring and reacting to the situation he’s in; all this being done to carefully protect his son.  While he appears superficially to be riddled with Child-ish behaviors, he’s actually very carefully constructing a unique salvation path for his son using apex Adult rational controls.  It is a pinnacle example of switching ego-states precisely by conscious self-control.

The second one that jumps onto the page for me is that of Jesus (the Christ).  This is a person largely in a rational ego-state, even under severe pressure, yet capable of switching appropriately to Child state for some playful banter at a few moments, and Parent state at a few times when some obstinate people simply need to be bluntly told “the rules”.

These examples stand out because they present a serious representation of the out-of-the-box nature that a triminded person presents.  Such a person may seem to switch ego-states, and could be classified by a formal psychological analysis as unbalanced because of that, but I am certain that it is more accurate that they are acting at an apex mental state of self-control, switching the ego states in a highly appropriate manner.

At a more humorous level, I’ve noticed these ego-states almost parodied in Star Trek.

• Spock and all Vulcans of course represent exclusively the Adult/Ego ego-state, the purely rationale, logical mind.
• Worf and all Klingons represent the Child/Id ego-state, the irrational, animal, emotional mind.
• The Borg represent the Parent/Super-Ego ego-state, the mindless rule-recital, acting to normalise all others to themselves and their rule sets.

So … who of interest is missing?  Humans!  Most vividly portrayed by Captain Kirk – sometimes emotional, sometimes rational, sometimes ruleological.  Kirk displays an very good mix of the right ego-state for the moment, swinging from amiable to strict, to rational in a seconds shift as the moment dictates.  Kirk is capable of, but not restricted to, the Adult ego-state as per Spock – so he’s able to react to the various situations presented in a complete and positive manner.

These are the most obvious examples I’ve seen in literature.  In real life, I am watching politicians, business people, and any amount of others show themselves to be either stuck in a fixed ego-state or switching involuntarily and unconsciously to unproductive ego-states and hence under-living their potential.   Maybe I’ll offer some examples for consideration at some stage, but historic or fictional figures are much safer targets, legally.

I talk about this a bit with friends.

I believe that the epidemic of mental health issues in developed countries is strongly linked to the massive increase in information and choice presented to developed countries’ lifestyles.

I spoke earlier of suicidal influences.  This was always tied to the thought stream “Why is it all so hard?”.  ”It all” being just life in general our western world.  Usually the context was tied to the Child id-state being unable to succeed in processing a set of inbound data/choice, and reaching a point of being overwhelmed on the topic.  At which point the Child mind drowns itself in feelings of failure and incapacity.  It’s not really that the whole person, the Gestalt, is incapable of processing the scenario adequately, it’s that the Adult id-state has been comatised and the Child id-state has tried to fire-hose the situation, failed and is crying in the corner, wondering “Why is it all so hard?”

I guess I have to credit my severity of thought and a random Parental script with staying alive.  A student minister (of religion) said to me when I was about 20 “You know, if you take your own life you cancel your ticket (to heaven)”.  Now disregarding the logic, theology, fairness, kindness or anything else about that statement, it kept me alive many times.  It was an unusually well-placed Script fragment, that played many times in my mind as a life-rule when the Child with the fire-hose was crying in the corner, beaten by life.  In effect the only door left had a sign on it saying “… but this would be worse”.

It’s hard to say how painful it is being sustained on the point of giving up for so long.  20 years?  The stick of Hell was not the only thing I had to help me though.  Every time I recanted the story of John Belushi, who killed himself because of the failure of The Blues Brothers at the box office – before it hit cult level.  The idea in this is “whatever hell I’m in now, it could be like The Blues Brothers, and tomorrow could bring a new hope that I never imagined”.

I’m also going to have to put forward that the encouragement of “think about how much those you leave behind will be hurt” is not as effective as you’d think it should be.  To me, when feeling completely overwhelmed by the “it’s all too hard”, it actually passed my mind that they will be better off in the long run not being subjected to my horrendous inner-pain.  Sure they’ll be hurt, a lot.  But the damage that I’m causing on an ongoing basis over the long term is worse.

That’s the Child id-state’s view.  Broken, ill-formed, lacking sound perspective, lacking a healthy foundation to operate from.  Struggling, and wondering why it seems so easy for everyone else to have friends and good jobs and everything else without the massive anxiety and depression kickbacks.

If I were to form advice to anyone attempting to rescue a depressed person showing signs of being overcome by life, for me the absolute best help was – take me out somewhere and include me in some thing fun.  Even if I keep appearing to be miserable, what is happening in my mind is that I’m being distanced from the misery of the impossible life I face at home/work  This gives me a glimpse of there being a worthwhile life for me aside from the impossible task-list.   All up, at the point of least will-to-live a few hours out at a pal’s place or at a park or something is a life-line.  Repeat this therapy every week or two for a while and I’m likely to get by the bad patch and keep it together.

I’ve never used it, because there’s a sea of barriers between the truly depressed and formal help, but if you’re reading this because you’re depressed then it’s my duty to point you to real counselling and medical help.  See your doctor and get a referral to a psychiatrist or psychologist.  See online resources like www.BeyondBlue.org.au

I’m self managing my id-states successfully enough to have confidence that I’m not at risk of disappearing into depression again, but it’s an act of serious cognitive focus.  At times I get loose with it and get cross or a bit heart-sick.  It’s not a Panacea, at least not one that landed cheaply or cleanly.

Recently I detected a root syndrome underpinning all of my inner reactions.  I am primally afraid of any new data, any movement, any sound, any new stimulus.

The genesis of this is likely to be in a prolonged nervous early childhood experience.

The consequence is that I am more fully armed for fight-flight before the logical mind is ready to act than most people.  The manifestation of this is that I’ve lived out a reactive, phobic, paranoid, hyper-vigilant life.  Also I am colossally distractable, in that my eyes and ears are always ready to shoot off to whatever new sight or sound is detected, the mind considers it a threat in some sense, and then the Boy with the Firehose swings into action to try to hose it down.

This of course is another manifestation of the Child-Id taking up primacy in the mind at a moment when it is poorly placed to be involved at all.  The Stimulus->Fear neurone bundle is way over-built and the Child-Id is far too ready to fire up and take over the mind-space.

It really all avalanched when I saw the Boy with the Firehose.

Here in my mind was the image of a child in a burning room with a firehose.  He’s trying to put the fires out.  Sometimes.  Sometimes he’s hosing flames, sometimes he’s hosing nothing at all.  Sometimes he’s hosing some interesting object, just because that is the most interesting thing happening (in his mind) at that time.

And the fire’s not really getting put out.  The child knows this, and sometimes he is overwhelmed with the reality of the situation and is horrified at this impossible task.  Sometimes he battles on imagining he’s a great firefighter and he can put this great blaze out. Sometimes he’s overwhelmed and just falls down and cries and cries at the futility of his own capacity in the face of the task.

The firehose is powerful, but the child is incapable of holding it on task or even of apprehending where exactly the firehose should be pointed at any one time.  It’s a mess.  The child knows it’s a mess too.  This knowledge in itself is appalling to the mind of the child, but what else can be done?  The child has no other capacity to offer to the task than to just point the firehose and hope that somehow it puts all this fire out.

My mind unraveled when I saw the Boy with the Firehose.  In my mind was this boy, myself, ungrown from childhood, trying to manage the life of an adult.  And the Firehose that it was pointing at the fires bursting out in life around him was a few-sigma-plus-IQ Adult rational brain.

Here was a Child-mind – emotional, scared, heaving with fears of long-gone childhood threats – and in his hands he had the full power of a highly-educated, highly-IQd, rational Adult-mind, ready to pour analytical thought on whatever trouble or trivia came into the Child-mind’s interest-view as either a threat or a titillation.

This was what caused me to find and invert the experience of the Child-mind being in control of the overall choice of mind-state from moment to moment in my life.

It was a moment of intense sadness.  There was this honest 6 year old.  Born smart enough to figure out a lot of life early, enough so that he didn’t recognise that adult life can only be understood by the well-balanced, well-developed Adult mind.  Instead my own little alien had grasped the mantle of comprehension of adult life too early and had never let go of that life-function.  Here was the mind of a virtual 6-10 year old fundamentally running the most important segments of my psychological life: defense against or processing of 3rd party criticism, defense and development of life-support structures such as work and education, trust permitted towards any 3rd persons on any matter of self-preservation.

There was a period for a week or so when I mourned for the poor child holding the firehose, valiantly and vainly fighting the fires of my life.  During that time I also charged my Adult-mind with the task of stepping up to the poor boy, taking his hand and helping him with the firehose.  In that first week, I was convinced that I had OCPD and that the firehose experience that I was enduring was in fact the OC trait –  the rushing mind, pouring unstoppable thoughts at whatever the Child directed the OC segment to obsess over.

After a week or two I became aware that the OC trait was actually grinding slowly to a halt.  The firehose, seemingly for the want of the frightened child as the instigator, was slowly but very obviously losing it’s powerful compulsive force.

After two weeks I came to the conclusion that the OC trait was in fact a falsehood overall.  What I believe I experienced was that the Child-mind was the first-responder to many of my life’s moment-to-moment situations, and along with looking up it’s petty stored rules of life in the archives of my childhood mind, it had a capacity to “lord it over” my rational analytical mind – if you like: my Adult-mind was a comatose slave, mindlessly driven by the Child-mind into pure intense rational thought on any topic that the Child-mind was terrified of or titillated by.

So this is how I now comprehend my history of OCPD behaviors.   A frightened Child, pouring high-IQ rational thought at whatever frightened it, in a very irrational and emotional way.

So, that was Boy with the Firehose.  Rest in peace, sweet child.

Now the Child plays when play is due, and the Adult goes to work and manages life.  The Child is happy because it’s in its right place in my life, and the Adult is facing up to the long clean-up of a lifetime run by a Child.  Better now than never.

This line of thought is one that I have threaded together both from my observations of parenting, and from untangling my own mind in parallel with that.

This is a really important foundation in my appreciation of adult psychology as well, and I find that many otherwise baffling child psychology issues fall into place quite readily with this in combination with my ideas about Idiofunctional mapping.

1. I am convinced that babies are born highly adept at solving logical puzzles, but without any frameworks of language, culture or indeed rational logic.  I picture this as “the little alien” – born intelligent and worthy of personal respect for their mind’s awareness and immediate capacity, but with an utter unfamiliarlity with our world.  All they can do from birth is take in information and make the best of it that they can, and thus they produce in their own minds the best-fit “meaning and rules of life”.  This all packs into the infant mind and crystalises before they reach about five.
2. The three enemies of this infant mind are complication, incongruity and hostility.  Two or more of these in combination can cause the infant mind to become overwhelmed by its own attempt to rationalise the incoming information. One of these in isolation could possibly be managed, while not ideal, but two or three of them is a huge challenge to infant mental health.

So the focus point is that rather than infants being some sort of dumb being, needing to be fed the rules of life by we all-smart adults, they are worthy of much more respect for their sheer intellectual capacity right from birth.  If anything our world is highly illogical and corrosive on the infant mind and it often results in a state of confusion – what would happen to any intelligent being that is being treated with little respect for that intelligence.

I have found some profound moments, where rather than going on being the “parent” just issuing rules to be followed, I opened a line of respectful questioning with our children to ask what they thought was happening in a sequence of life at home, and found that they had made some quite intelligent and logical interpretations of events, based on their perspective.  Consequently we were able to discover how some simple things could be re-explained to make sense of a conflict situation, where previously it was just a petty dispute with no obvious cause or resolution.

This sort of repositioning requires the grown-up to be able to engage the infant in an Adult-Adult transaction, and I found this to be very possible if the infant has observed the grown-up to be able to shift into “sensible voice” appropriately (the term I use to describe the Adult mind-state, as explained to the infant).  I’ll describe this more later.