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A blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly see

190 点作者 fahimulhaq超过 9 年前

18 条评论

pbz超过 9 年前
That&#x27;s just another example of how little we know about our brains and how they interact with our bodies. We&#x27;re at the stage where we see stars in the sky, rotating every night, and think they go around the earth. Or see people getting sick around others and thinking they&#x27;re cursed.<p>DID offers us a rare insight into what&#x27;s possible. When all your life you saw nothing but hills, the concept of a mountain is hard to wrap your mind around. Imagine your brain being able to shut down your pancreas. Then another part (personality) comes forward and your pancreas is suddenly fine. One minute you&#x27;re diabetic, the other you&#x27;re fine. This is an example of a mountain we have a hard time accepting.
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openasocket超过 9 年前
From my understanding, DID is not a well accepted diagnosis my psychologists. I can&#x27;t comment about this person specifically, but in many cases people diagnosed with DID actually have borderline personality disorder. It&#x27;s a condition characterized by an inability to regulate emotions. They tend to experience their emotions in the extreme, regard others as either entirely good or entirely bad, etc. People with this condition are also very emotionally fragile, and are very suggestible. If a doctor starts asks them a leading question about having multiple personalities, they may internalize that and act accordingly.<p>Source: my father, a clinical psychologist
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SeanDav超过 9 年前
It is well known that extreme physical problems like blindness and paralysis can have purely psychological origins. It is &quot;all in the mind&quot; yet the symptoms are completely real to the patient. Its causes are way more complicated than a cry for attention or other similar utterances of street smart &quot;wisdom&quot;.<p>See Somatization disorder and Conversion disorder.
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rthomas6超过 9 年前
Dissociative identity disorder makes me wonder about the nature of our identity. Which personality is the <i>real</i> person? Clearly at least some of these personalities are not central to the identify of the person -- clearly not the teenage boy. It stands to reason that one or even <i>none</i> of the personalities truly represent the person, and that they are simply projections of the mind. Then I start thinking about the normal case of one personality. Is the normal case somehow different? Is our mind-created identity <i>really</i> us, any more than B.T.&#x27;s several mind-created identities are really her? Or is it just a projection of our mind?<p>Put another way, is our personality a part of our identity, or is it merely an extension of us, in the same way an arm or leg is a part of us? If we cut off an arm, we are no less ourselves. If B.T. lost a few personalities, we would agree that B.T. is no less herself. If we lost our own personality, our &quot;ego&quot;, would we be no less ourselves? Eastern philosophy says yes. I see the logic, but I&#x27;m having trouble accepting it.
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hellofunk超过 9 年前
Some soldiers in WWII would go blind temporarily from high anxiety. There are different forms of blindness, some are biological and others are psychological.
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mark-r超过 9 年前
Truth is stranger than fiction. The idea of psychological shutting down of the senses was the premise of the Who&#x27;s album Tommy in 1969. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tommy_(album)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tommy_(album)</a><p>I wonder if there were earlier reports of this kind of thing?
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benten10超过 9 年前
Do read the first few comments too. They seem to raise legitimate concerns regarding the methodology &#x2F;misaligned interests in the research. Regardless, I&#x27;m skeptical of the skeptics&#x27; suggestions.
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azernik超过 9 年前
Maybe even more interesting:<p>&quot;At first, B.T.’s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn’t even see the individual letters that made up the words, just the words themselves. But it gradually expanded, first to higher-order visual processes (like reading), then to lower-level ones (like recognizing patterns) until most of her personalities were able to see most of the time.&quot;
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lojack超过 9 年前
Couldn&#x27;t another possibility is that her blindness was indeed the result of physical damage to her brain and her regained vision was the result of using other neural pathways in the brain. I remember reading an article not too long ago where people clinically blind people from birth were able to recognize visual stimuli subconsciously. Similarly she may not be able to consciously see new things as much as have an intuition about what parts of her vision are still working.<p>The mind is really an amazing thing and this combination could bring to light discoveries about how both vision and various mental disorders affect the brain.
mark_lee超过 9 年前
When human beings are extremely frightened, they may faint,blind or die, even there&#x27;s no any physically contact. It looks psychological problem can be a physical problem temporarily or permanently.
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thelastguy超过 9 年前
So if you hear only a single voice in your head, then you&#x27;re normal. It&#x27;s called being normal.<p>If you hear your voice, AND other voices that do NOT belong to you, in your head, BUT, they can NOT control your body, then it&#x27;s called Schizophrenia.<p>And if you hear your voice, and hear other voices that do NOT belong to you, and these voices can sometimes take control your body from you, then it&#x27;s called Multiple Personalities Disorder.<p>This begs the question. Doctors keep saying the voices that Schizophrenia hear are not real. Yet, they themselves know that the voices they hear are real. As real as their own voice in their head. As real as the voice you and I hear in our head. The only thing is, the voices they hear, they know does not belong to them.<p>In other word, Schizo has some kind of brain defects where instead of the brain creating only a single voice, a single entity, the brain creates multiple voices. So those voices Schizo hear are not hallucinations, but rather, real voices like your voice in your head right now. Only problem is, those voices has no control over the body, unlike your voice.<p>However, if a defect happen, where the voices can temporary take over the body, then maybe that&#x27;s what Multiple Personality Disorder is.<p>This also make sense why she becomes blind. She takes control of her body, but they take control of her vision.
astral303超过 9 年前
Mental health is no joke
Nursie超过 9 年前
As far as I know Multiple Personality Disorder is, to put it mildly, not very accepted by the mental health community.<p>I have no doubts at all that one can be truly blind for a variety of non-physical or partially physical reasons, I do not doubt that this woman experienced blindness. But this personality&#x2F;identity stuff is very questionable indeed.
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divs1210超过 9 年前
I think a part of her brain got damaged, so it started relying on other neural paths that were still functional.<p>It&#x27;s still trying out different paths, hence the different personalities. A new vision-related path is in the works, but not ready for production right now.
Mz超过 9 年前
I am short on time today and just don&#x27;t have time to read through all the comments (or even the article at the moment, sigh -- I would love to read this), but I have something of a longstanding interest in multiple personality disorder and I have read of cases where physical things, like scars or moles, appeared and disappeared depending upon which personality was being expressed at the time.
readams超过 9 年前
His eyes can see<p>His ears can hear his lips speak<p>All the time the needles flick and rock.<p>No machine can give the kind of stimulation,<p>Needed to remove his inner block.
stonewhite超过 9 年前
&quot;A woman with display driver problems who had dualboot has intermittent issues with display&quot;
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ajkjk超过 9 年前
My favorite thing about stories like this is that the provide a lot of data for mental modeling:<p>Suppose you&#x27;re attempting to build up a mental(&#x2F;scientific) model of how the human brain works. You&#x27;re trying to come up with a set of abstractions and rules for how those abstractions interact, with which you can intuit, without performing a full simulation, the answers to experimental questions. That is, your model should produce concrete predictions: if I prod the brain at A, B will happen; invisible effect C is correlated with visible effect D; nebulous phenomena E and F are well-defined instances of type G. A good model is more like a type system than a simulation; it gives you names and concepts that match (with some loss of fidelity) those used by reality. It lets you write valid programs (explanations) that match programs (physics) that are being executed by reality.<p>The report that a person had multiple personalities and some of them were blind, leads to the logical &#x27;program&#x27;:<p>Either<p>(this person has a brain structure that was so bizarre it isn&#x27;t related to the rest of the species&#x27; brains) [assume this is false]<p>Or<p>(it is possible for humans to contain multiple personalities which are not equally able to interact with sensory organs)<p>Therefore =&gt;<p>(it is possible for human brains to contain multiple personalities)<p>(sensory organs are wired into personalities)<p>(personalities can lose their wiring to sensory organs without physical damage to the organs)<p>That is, a single report cuts out a huge swathe of model-space. With a single example we are obliged to include in EVERY model concepts of personalities (or something, er, homomorphic to them), and a concept of a wiring to the sensory organs, and the ability to express that this wiring can become broken.<p>A perfect model must explain every example (or leave a place for as-yet-undiscovered mechanisms to explain them). New examples put new burdens on every existing explanation. They cut model-space down by, presumably, percentage chunks (&quot;excise the subspace of model-space that doesn&#x27;t model personalities and wiring personalities to sensory organs&quot;). If you imagine that there are something like 2^N possible models at a given granularity, then, the cuts are approximately reducing us to 2^(N-1) each time. Our models with N degrees of freedom that has to explain E experiments has more like N-E degrees of freedom (disregarded &#x27;covariance&#x27; between experimental results). What this means is that a random model is overwhelmingly likely to be <i>wrong</i> with each successive experiment. (In practice our models have large dark spots where we leave many degrees of freedom open - but even still, it&#x27;s likely that any explicit modeling choice we make ends up being incorrect, and quickly.)<p>(This math is pretty made-up. We could do better with something akin to Kolgomorov complexity rather than degrees of freedom, since type systems should be discounted by how complex they are so that systems more complex than reality actually is end up contributing nothing to the total.)<p>Summary: I enjoy stories about weird neuroscience because they defy my mental model of &quot;how brains work&quot; almost every time, even if I keep revising it.