The woman with 20+ personalities in one body

I have less problem with those two things than I have with scars disappearing.

A burn was induced without heat? That's a tad difficult to believe. Oh wait, it was a "burn effect."

I have no philosophical issue with multiple personalities up to a point. I'm just suspicious that it has become the thing of urban legend.

Is this all you got?
Couple of lines of passive aggressive replies based on cherry picked bits and pieces? Filtered out to avoid tackling the subject at all?

Gee, no wonder discussions with you drag ad infinitum. :eek:
 
You're not? Not even when you wonder if this could be " a glitch in the matrix"? Bucky believe it or not, you do set a precedent through your previous postings on this forum that this example suggests that you think it's a bit too crowded for that woman's mind to contain all 20 personalities. Is that what you have in mind?
The subject of the discussion is not "what I have in mind", rather it is the topic presented in the opening post.

cheers
 
After looking through the claims here I found something very interesting about Dr. Braun. It seems he had many problems with the law in the past and this is not the only site which reports this about him. The whole story is in the link down besides this quote:

On November 5, 1997, Pat Burgus and her family had their first victory against two of their therapists and Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital here in Chicago. On that day the media reported a $10.6 million settlement (the largest ever in a recovered memory case) of a lawsuit against the hospital and two therapists. These therapists were identified by The New York Times, in a front page story, as Dr. Bennett Braun, director of the trauma unit and Dr. Elva Poznanski, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry.


http://www.illinoisfms.org/Braun.html

Just google his name with connection with the name Burgus.
 
Is this all you got?
So you think tossing out the claim that scars disappear is a minor issue?

Couple of lines of passive aggressive replies based on cherry picked bits and pieces? Filtered out to avoid tackling the subject at all?
What's to tackle? I have no problem believing that the brain is capable of generating and compartmentalizing multiple personalities. As I said, though, only up to a point. Disappearing scars goes beyond that point.

People appear to believe this requires some kind of mind(s) /= brain. I don't see why.

~~ Paul
 
The subject of the discussion is not "what I have in mind", rather it is the topic presented in the opening post.

cheers
What shall we discuss?
The "matrix"? Biological and psychiatric causes for multiple personality disorder? There's more to consciousness? Which is a loaded question. Which of the three is it?
 
So you think tossing out the claim that scars disappear is a minor issue?
I didn't toss anything :)
I've simply reported what is explained in an article. If you think it's not credible, then fair enough. The article itself doesn't provide clear references to the specific case, although since skin blisters can be generated via hypnosis in susceptible subjects, it's not that huge stretch that these subjects may show a similar effect.

Similarly allergies that come and go as these personalities alternate seems also pretty unusual. At least these phenomena are challenging our current medical knowledge, just like the "ice man" guy (Wim Hof) who is able to exert an impressive control over his physiology, again something unheard of, unless you go searching among pro meditators in the east.
(And the again skeptics will dismiss the cases as stories, at least the dutch guy has been tested dozens of times in controlled conditions).

There is quite a lot of recent psychiatric literature on this subject (MPD) supported by fMRI evidence that suggests these problem are real. Cause of course... we cannot believe the poor sufferers, we need a machine to tells us they are really sick! :eek:

People appear to believe this requires some kind of mind(s) /= brain. I don't see why.
To be fair we don't even understand how the brain secretes one personality, let alone a multitude of them ;)
 
Similarly allergies that come and go as these personalities alternate seems also pretty unusual. At least these phenomena are challenging our current medical knowledge, just like the "ice man" guy (Wim Hof) who is able to exert an impressive control over his physiology, again something unheard of, unless you go searching among pro meditators in the east.
(And the again skeptics will dismiss the cases as stories, at least the dutch guy has been tested dozens of times in controlled conditions).

There is quite a lot of recent psychiatric literature on this subject (MPD) supported by fMRI evidence that suggests these problem are real. Cause of course... we cannot believe the poor sufferers, we need a machine to tells us they are really sick! :eek:

I would say that kind of things put the mind=body relation to it's very limit, but I wouldn't say it disproves it, since we currently don't know how much the mind can affect other parts of the body under mainstream neuroscience.
 
I didn't toss anything :)
I've simply reported what is explained in an article. If you think it's not credible, then fair enough.
I think the scar question is important because it points to the possibility that this whole thing has become inflated by urban legend.

To be fair we don't even understand how the brain secretes one personality, let alone a multitude of them ;)
Agreed. But if it can do one, why not several? On the other hand, I have two good friends who are psychiatrists and they both are skeptical about more than a couple or three personalities. They suggest that the psychiatrists themselves might be one cause of the charade of 10 or 20 personalities.

~~ Paul
 
I think the scar question is important because it points to the possibility that this whole thing has become inflated by urban legend.

Tried to find something on this. Quick google search brought me to a few articles which mentioned it, but haven't found any papers yet. I'll probably look some more. If anyone else finds any actual studies on this, please post.
 
Agreed. But if it can do one, why not several? On the other hand, I have two good friends who are psychiatrists and they both are skeptical about more than a couple or three personalities. They suggest that the psychiatrists themselves might be one cause of the charade of 10 or 20 personalities.
That's interesting.
What is not entirely clear though is why 2-3 personalities would be plausible, while a higher number would sound dubious. What is the problem exactly?

The alleged dozens of personalities are likely to be calculated as a grand total: some of these alter egos manifest for a number of years before vanishing, usually replaced by new ones. So it's unlikely to be 20 different characters at once. There are usually minor personalities that appear infrequently while others are taking over on a regular basis.

More evidence that the dissociative disorder is not caused by imagination or role-playing:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0098795
http://anp.sagepub.com/content/48/5/402

For more you can follow the discussion on wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dissociative_identity_disorder

For some reason the "PET MRI scans prove the separateness of identity states" is held from publication because it was poorly written, but it also contain recent studies that should be referenced.
 
I was with you after two sentences, but then you declared that idealism gets rid of restrictive assumptions. I think if you're honest about idealism and make sure it really describes the world as we know it, you don't get rid of assumptions.

I don't know if you've noticed, but outside of religion, nobody cares about any of this crap. The world is what it is, whether you want to consider it mental, material or both makes no difference. Somehow these metaphysical paradigms are useful for providing a framework from which science can draw assumptions. But as Bernardo himself asserts, not even science needs such nonsense. Materialism is stupid, because it is a set of beliefs. Sure, Idealism could be the same in ways that might be unpredictable presently, but we must evolve. Progress and stuff.

I'd like to see science look into those hypothesized morphic fields a little more closely. I think Sheldrake might be onto something. Too bad for me that so many scientistic gatekeepers are heavily invested in their dumb beliefs... Let us also not forget that mind can create matter. We have no evidence of matter creating mind. The former is all-encompassing while the latter is limited in regards to its threshold for assumptions.
 
I don't know if you've noticed, but outside of religion, nobody cares about any of this crap. The world is what it is, whether you want to consider it mental, material or both makes no difference.
I agree. But this is a discussion forum. ;-)

Somehow these metaphysical paradigms are useful for providing a framework from which science can draw assumptions. But as Bernardo himself asserts, not even science needs such nonsense. Materialism is stupid, because it is a set of beliefs. Sure, Idealism could be the same in ways that might be unpredictable presently, but we must evolve. Progress and stuff.
Everything is a set of beliefs. Perhaps you mean it is a set of faiths. Indeed, every metaphysic requires some underlying assumptions. That's what we're talking about.

I'd like to see science look into those hypothesized morphic fields a little more closely. I think Sheldrake might be onto something. Too bad for me that so many scientistic gatekeepers are heavily invested in their dumb beliefs... Let us also not forget that mind can create matter. We have no evidence of matter creating mind. The former is all-encompassing while the latter is limited in regards to its threshold for assumptions.
How would you suggest that scientists study morphic fields? (Sheldrake is a scientist, after all, so he could certainly spend more time experimenting with his own hypothesis.) Since morphic fields are only falsifiable on a case-by-case basis by coming up with a different explanation for the phenomenon, it is difficult to study them in general.

We have plenty of evidence of matter that exists without a mind to create it: What keeps the trees in your yard consistent between one look and the next? You can hypothesize that it's some sort of meta-mind, but that is just an hypothesis.

~~ Paul
 
Everything is a set of beliefs. Perhaps you mean it is a set of faiths. Indeed, every metaphysic requires some underlying assumptions. That's what we're talking about.

Good for everything. I'm not talking about everything. Faith is belief. Why even comment? Stop wasting my time. You're taking me away from my 9/11 studies.
How would you suggest that scientists study morphic fields? (Sheldrake is a scientist, after all, so he could certainly spend more time experimenting with his own hypothesis.) Since morphic fields are only falsifiable on a case-by-case basis by coming up with a different explanation for the phenomenon, it is difficult to study them in general.

I was simply illustrating a point. Do you want to discuss morphic fields now?
We have plenty of evidence of matter that exists without a mind to create it: What keeps the trees in your yard consistent between one look and the next? You can hypothesize that it's some sort of meta-mind, but that is just an hypothesis.

Stop adding your own points to mine. Just do your thinking inside your head. You don't have to type it out in replies.
 
Good for everything. I'm not talking about everything. Faith is belief. Why even comment? Stop wasting my time. You're taking me away from my 9/11 studies.
Faith is when you hold something to be true without evidence. Belief is when you hold something to be true with evidence.

I was simply illustrating a point. Do you want to discuss morphic fields now?
Love to. I think they are a more or less unfalsifaible concept with a huge pile of goalpost moving built in.

Stop adding your own points to mine. Just do your thinking inside your head. You don't have to type it out in replies.
You don't seem to understand what a conversation is. If you just want to talk to yourself, add some kind of footnote to your post.

~~ Paul
 
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