At 10:53 PM 6/26/2005, rmiller wrote:
At 03:44 PM 6/26/2005, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Dear Richard,
Let me follow up on your suggestion: Assuming a "personality" is made
up of multiple modules,does it necessarily follow that a "hidden
observer" exist as a seperate entiry, or could it be that the usual
single personality results from an entrainment (the modules become like
oscillators that couple to each other) over the many modules?
Hilgard asked the "entity" that question more than a few times. The
hidden observer came across as quite normal-sounding. reasonable and
real. A Finnish psychologist by the name of Reima Kampmann made an
extensive study of the phenomenon, but unfortunately published little--and
what he did publish was never translated to any languages other than
Finnish. Bottom line: The hidden observer seems to be as real as such
entities can be--or perhaps as real as some of the better business
CEOs. Certainly better than some of the former CEOs in the news
lately. Otherwise, it appears that the hidden observer phenom has not
been studied in depth. I haven't seen much published research.
This idea predicts that if this entrainment mode is unstable and
there are other possible metastale entrainment modes possible, then the
personality that emerges is unstable; we get the symptons of
multiple-personality disorder that makes "personalities" analogous to
the metastable (phase space) orbits of a chaotic system.
If no stable or metastable entrainments between the multiple modules
obtain, we have the symptoms of autism. No?
Autism supposedly has been associated with structural changes based upon
CT cans. Beyond that I don't know enough about autism to
comment. Ornstein suggests that multiple-personalities are rather
normal. On the other hand, there are some great books out there about
this complex and weird phenom. For those who think the brain is just a
complex radio set, multiple personality disorder can be thought of as
merely having a crummy tuner (coil?) or a bad antenna. Melvin Morse, a
Seattle pediatrician suggested that there is an antenna of a sort--and
it's located in the right temporal sulcus. According to his books, this
area also serves as some sort of ejection seat for the soul. I wrote a
novel a few years ago that hypothesized a specific EEG signal emanating
from this area (resolved using a standard Fast Fourier Transform
circuit.) By monitoring the wavelet coming from this area, one could
determine the time of exit for an OOBE.
Rich M
. . .Fiction, of course. Still, it might be interesting to see if there
are EEG changes that occur as personalities in the MPE patient switch on
and off. I've heard that each personality presents a unique EEG--which,
if true, might support your model.
