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My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

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Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#91

Post by baby »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #83
pbz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the part/alter. Some have a different image of themselves and wouldn't recognize "themselves" in the picture. Some may think you're trying to trick them.

Hmm, tricky. What about carrying a mirror as well; do folks retain the ability to recognise themselves that way?

Then you could think you're dreaming, or that you're being shown a fake mirror, or that you are in the matrix, or... When your brain is trying to make you believe something, then you will see every prooves and ignore the rest. Some sort of extreme bias confirmation.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#92

Post by pbz »

kazinator wrote: post #84
pbz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever driven home and when you got there you weren't sure how it happened? You didn't remember driving the entire time. Your hands were at the wheel, but your "mind" was somewhere else.

If it was your home and you recognized it, and the people in it, then that is not relevant here at all. You're equivocating between the colloquial use of "dissociate" (as in "marathon runners practice dissociation and association") and the clinical term as it is used in this context for a disturbing disorder which has nothing to do with driving a memorized route on "auto pilot". And, by the way, you'd still hit the b…

The kind of dissociation you may experience driving a car (being on auto-pilot) is definitely not as extreme as DID, but they share the same foundation. This is our current understanding of how it works. If you don't believe me you'll have to take it up with the professionals in the field.

Comparing zoning out with DID is like comparing a hill to a mountain. However, I understand where you're coming from. I don't know how to explain it briefly. The mind works in parallel, way more than we think. So it can focus on two things at once, but "you" may not be part of both at all times. You'd have to let go of the idea that "you" (the person that typed that message) control or are even aware of everything that goes on in your mind. You're just an inhabitant (part) of your mind, and you don't control your mind. (This probably doesn't make much sense; sorry.)

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#93

Post by 001sky »

kazinator wrote: post #84
pbz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever driven home and when you got there you weren't sure how it happened? You didn't remember driving the entire time. Your hands were at the wheel, but your "mind" was somewhere else.

If it was your home and you recognized it, and the people in it, then that is not relevant here at all. You're equivocating between the colloquial use of "dissociate" (as in "marathon runners practice dissociation and association") and the clinical term as it is used in this context for a disturbing disorder which has nothing to do with driving a memorized route on "auto pilot". And, by the way, you'd still hit the b…

This is too strong a response. You and nobody else has a 1:1 memory map of an intense experience. It can takes weeks if not months (plural) to remember everything that happened to you in the last month. That is because basically your brain samples space time and segments in in your memory in a non-linear fashion. This is why people have flashbacks. When people recall linear events, they only recal prioritized samples. (eg, highlights, takeaways). It's universally understood that this sampling is also highly biased. That is why we have the concept of "type 2 fun". You can google this but the gist of it is that lots of things that are insufferable during the event form warm and fuzzy memories afterward upon recall. There is also the related case histories of people who compartmentalize basically into a black hole, where the thoughts never come back to consciousness or only after some extraordinary event (therapy, or otherwise). Certain types of trauma survivors fall in to this category.

Clinical use of disassociation is somthing involving this process and its important to understand it as part of a continuum.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#94

Post by lotophage »

csense wrote: post #46

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours. Hmm, maybe this…

> Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture?

There is a long history of this in Neuropsychology. It's referred to as Double Dissociation [1]. Arguably, this is more about the hardware, but the hardware affects the software ("Brain is the seat of the Mind").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28neuropsycholog...

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#95

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

Online, I've met people with a different form of the same condition, or maybe a related condition: they seem to have multiple persons in their head, and will occasionally switch between them. Like many mental health issues it's difficult for me to think about because I have no frame of reference.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#96

Post by sjtrny »

mapt wrote: post #80
sjtrny wrote: post #45

Does anyone have an explanation for why she can tell a dissociatve episode is about to happen? It strikes me as really odd.

Because there is a self-aware, behavioral component to not just dissociative events, but to most maladaptive psychiatric disorders. This component may be small or large - the fact that we've medicalized the disorder simply says that the overall pattern of behavior is causing severe problems, nothing about cause or self-awareness. The people afflicted with them are not simply normal people who are possessed by a rando…

I feel the same way. It is infuriating how hard it is to determine what is actually going on in the mind of another.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#97

Post by mathattack »

ttty wrote: post #77
mathattack wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why a lot of cognitive psychologists study abnormal psychology. It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. I do think being able to blank things out (including times of immense pain) is a feature that increases survival rather than a bug. If you are excessively afraid, your ability to pass on your genes goes down.

like hackers which hunt unwanted trace output or unexpected errors (:

Exactly! The magic is revealed when things go wrong.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#99

Post by Balgair »

csense wrote: post #46

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours. Hmm, maybe this…

Failure modes are almost the best ways to figure it out. H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison) is a famous case of what can go wrong with seemingly small areas of architecture.

One thing to keep in mind is that the brain is not an OS, it is more of a FPGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array) that is programmed by experience and life. Memory is very much dissociated all over the brain and in non-intuitive ways. For example the motor cortex deals with voluntary (non-reflexive) movement and is in the cortex near the top of your brain. However, given enough time and practice, these movements become controlled by the cerebellum, that little wrinkly thing hanging onto the back and bottom of your brainstem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning).

Abuse has a much longer history than just the social ones the we humans experience. Though your description of the mechanisms that may underlie this and the reasoning behind it is cloudy, I would assume that the evolutionary pressure to disassociate mentally is a preserved one throughout evolution. We can see this most memorably with dogs that learn to roll over or become head-shy, this may be a form of the behavior that has been with mammals and manifests itself similarly though not in the same way for each species. Also, our view of slavery is distorted and brutal, Roman slave laws were permissive in the later years of the empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm...) and even allowed legal redress of the slave to the master. If we evolved in this system, then most humans had to be slaves from the point of view of genes. This is possible, though not probable.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#100

Post by zorpner »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #78
rmxt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the mansplanation -- glad that you can tell us all about how voluntary it was from up on your high horse of rationality and the saddle of free will. Now, whole bodies of academic work, and whole fields of science, would suggest that "little flip out episodes" that can be classified according to well developed criteria are significant enough to be named and described. Naming, description and classification…

I don't see how his reply is sexist. I suppose we could really reach for something to justify the use of the term "mansplanation", but I think it detracts from the point you're trying to make. Now, I'm not saying that this is the case in this story, but having gone through school in the late 90s and early 2000s I saw plenty of what the parent comment described. It was cool to have "mental issues" in some crowds, main…

His comment buys into and presumes a number of sexist tropes, primarily relating to the idea that women manipulate men using false erratic behavior and that there exist men, generally characterized in a way the author perceives as emasculating ("dramatic", "hipster"), who welcome this manipulation.

In all but the most egregious cases of sexism, it will be possible to find justifications for how the negative connotations could apply to all sexes. This is a pernicious way in which sexists recruit otherwise neutral parties to their defense -- our natural desire is to give the benefit of the doubt and particularly on HN, we love to find technicalities and loopholes. The key is that they will generally fall into existing sexist tropes, as this does, and more critically while they could apply to men, in the context provided they do not.

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