Cinnabar
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Nak, thank you for providing us with Jill Bolte Taylor's account of her stroke, succinctly yet powerfully outlining the workings of the left and right hemisphers of the brain and what they house. It was interesting to learn the function of the corpus collosum and how it connects the two hemispheres together though each having two distinctly separate lives, so to speak.
She states that it's the left hemisphere which says I am. Now of course, I'm going to bring Dissociative Idenity Disorder into the equation. Persons with DID have the abstract "I" which can view personai (or alters) and their landscapes. But there is no "I am". Now this ability to create personai which function to protect this abstract "I" must take place in the right hemisphere as the whole of DID is phenominally creative. Taylor says that when not left brain functioning she could hear inner voices which is true of DID persons. She also explains the euphoric sense of feeling light weighted, detached from her body. Out of Body Experiences (OBE) is also common to DID. But here is the need to "escape" not a symptom of a stroke.
She goes onto explain that the left brain is the "choreographer of life". With DID there is no "one" choreographer of life but distinct personas who choreograph their own individual lives and because this involves a high level of creativity I will also assume this takes place in the right hemisphere. I'm given cause to believe a person with DID is not "grounded" in the left hemisphere of the brain. But some pernonai will draw from it. The ones designed to problem solve, working things out logically for the System as a whole. Now, when disconnected from her left hemisphere she claims to have heard inner voices which is also common to DID persons. I'd be curious to know if her voices interacted as do voices of those with DID.
In the end, she says "If we could all step to the right hemisphere we would see the "we" inside of us. That we would know Nirvana". Something pure. And there "is" something pure about having DID. Out from pure innocence as a child, and from scrap, we constructed something very organic in order to "survive" in the world at large.
Nak, thank you so much for introducing her. An amazing woman who has given me cause to examine myself in a more "left brained" way.
And to end with some points of interest:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro99/web3/Sancar.html
She states that it's the left hemisphere which says I am. Now of course, I'm going to bring Dissociative Idenity Disorder into the equation. Persons with DID have the abstract "I" which can view personai (or alters) and their landscapes. But there is no "I am". Now this ability to create personai which function to protect this abstract "I" must take place in the right hemisphere as the whole of DID is phenominally creative. Taylor says that when not left brain functioning she could hear inner voices which is true of DID persons. She also explains the euphoric sense of feeling light weighted, detached from her body. Out of Body Experiences (OBE) is also common to DID. But here is the need to "escape" not a symptom of a stroke.
She goes onto explain that the left brain is the "choreographer of life". With DID there is no "one" choreographer of life but distinct personas who choreograph their own individual lives and because this involves a high level of creativity I will also assume this takes place in the right hemisphere. I'm given cause to believe a person with DID is not "grounded" in the left hemisphere of the brain. But some pernonai will draw from it. The ones designed to problem solve, working things out logically for the System as a whole. Now, when disconnected from her left hemisphere she claims to have heard inner voices which is also common to DID persons. I'd be curious to know if her voices interacted as do voices of those with DID.
In the end, she says "If we could all step to the right hemisphere we would see the "we" inside of us. That we would know Nirvana". Something pure. And there "is" something pure about having DID. Out from pure innocence as a child, and from scrap, we constructed something very organic in order to "survive" in the world at large.
Nak, thank you so much for introducing her. An amazing woman who has given me cause to examine myself in a more "left brained" way.
And to end with some points of interest:
Some organic causes of dissociation are both known and suspected. For example, many experts believe that temporal lobe epilepsy may lead to a dissociative disorder.
Imaging studies seem to support the theoretical claims of the sequestering of fragmented information. It would seem that the neural memory traces that hold the specifics of the trauma (imagery, sensory input, sound, smell, etc.) are isolated from one another. They are in essence compartmentalized. This implies that in fact small portions of the brain are isolated or compartmentalized. The only way in which these memories could retain their fragmented and isolated status is if the areas of the brain that housed and retained the information were not connected to one another to form a coherent whole.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro99/web3/Sancar.html
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