Online Anthropology: Borderline Voices and the Self

One of my favourite voices

I'll return to Hacking the Mind in subsequent posts. It leans heavily on neuroscience and technology, which lack the depth we tack to individual experiences of consciousness.

In the context of personality types, my view is that the hardest nut to crack is the experience and expression of 'self'. I am not referring to textbook, jargon-filled definitions of self one runs across in psychiatry, psychology, or philosophy... though. (If you know of salient references, please let me know.) 

1. Anthropology of online voices 

Instead, this is a pedestrian approach: look at what people write online about their experiences as atypical neurological beings. Some of these voices are eloquent, compelling and fascinating. One example is the book 'The Buddha and the Borderline', which is a personal account of perhaps the most complex and fascinating disorder. Borderline disorder often, but not always, manifests as an experience of 'fragmented self'.

Since each person is their own unique being, it's important not to put to much emphasis on any one voice. It's also important not to come at this with too many preconceptions. Indeed psychiatry is a mess when it comes to personality disorders.  Many people, who should know, agree. Unsurprisingly successful treatment is rare, with certain exceptions including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).

Much to my appreciation and respect, a number of online voices speak eloquently, and with candour, about their sense of self and how that plays out in their lives. Anthropology means to look across many voices to find both the commonalities and differences.  Form your own impressions. Join in with comments and questions.

2. How this project can work

My aim is to create an anthropology of online voices from communities engaging different personality types to offer glimpses into how radically different these experiences of consciousness and life are --  letting others speak in their own voice, organizing into themes, without hopefully too much bias. I hope my fellow travellers find their way here to offer their voices in the comments section. That would be the best result I could hope for, or start your own blog too!

There is always the possibility of deception, especially in personality disorders. Indeed Munchausen by Internet is an accepted phenomenon. Even if a description is false, it still has meaning to the person who wrote it, otherwise they would not bother.  I take it for granted that some quotes excerpted here as part of thematic discussions now and in the future will be fake.

On the other hand, how well do we really know ourselves? Don't some of us deceive ourselves about who we are --  a few times in life when it mattered?

3. Voice of a Borderline self

Skybuzz
SEP 06, 2014

For most Borderlines, the ones I have met in DBT, and also on line, the striking similarity is a personality that never formed. Another definition of this could be ‘fragmentation’- a puzzle of a human being's mind that was never ‘put together’.

That’s the ‘lack of self’. For me this has been devastating- no real career goals, no sense of identity in who am and what I do. In my ‘recovery’ from BPD , I am beginning to see a sense of self, my interests, talents and true abilities. Many borderlines never actualize who and what they are, which leads to the anger, negative thoughts, rage- cutting and ultimately suicide.

A poignant post. I'd like to understand this fragmentation better -- an unintegrated, fractured self for some people with borderline disorder-- a fluid self for a psychopath. How do these self senses differ and how, if at all, are they similar?

4. About myself

I'm not a mental health expert, and am not equipped to give advice. I read a great deal, and will link to any authoritative article I can find to verify claims. Please join in with comments if you have some other articles or information you want to contribute, or you think I have got something wrong, or you want to share your voice.

Hacking the Mind (Part 2): A Sense of Self

Having read this far you might wonder if people really will be walking around with electrical and optical circuits embedded in their brain.  Those circuits would be connected to an implanted computer and power source, to modify thoughts and to change behaviour based on pre-conscious signals. 

This idea may seem far fetched and a bit creepy. It pushes boundaries of what we think a self is, a ponderous subject I will move to in subsequent posts.  It is also one aspect linking optogenetics and thought-stopping, in my mind, to personality disorders.  I only mention it briefly here.

3. Self Sense in Sociopaths

It's well-accepted that sociopaths maintain a more fluid sense of self than neuro-typicals. The sense of self in people with borderline personality disorder is also atypical. 

Individual descriptions of self-identity, self-respect, and  a self itself vary widely. There is no one size fits all answer.  For example, one can find lengthy discussions on internet forums about theses senses of self, some claiming indeed no sense of self as is commonly understood.  Look, for instance, in the comments section of ME Thomas blog sociopathworld.com, particularly in a "viewpoints" posting. (This requires hitting the 'load more' button at least four times to see all the comments, or you can take my word for it.) 

If one agrees that personality disorders exist together with less extreme neurological forms, which I call personality types -- those who are not disordered but differ in fundamental ways from the typical case, it goes without saying that such types would not only perceive others in vastly different ways, as objects for instance, but also themselves.

4. Neural implants, thought-stopping and information theory

People are already living with neural, or brain implants to treat conditions like Parkinson's, depression and other neurological defects. As well, research in brain-computer chip interfaces takes place at institutions globally, and is part of the growing dominance of neuroscience as a funding target for governments.

To do thought-stopping, one has to decode the pre-conscious signals in the brain. This problem is not so different than being able to predict epileptic seizures. 

Seizure prediction has for decades been a collaborative effort between doctors and scientists using information theory to decode the brain's activity patterns. This is not to say that seizures are a 'thought', but both are a cascade of signals sent around the brain, so the decoding/prediction problems are not so different in that respect.

More than a decade ago, Kreuz and others developed a set of techniques to validate prediction algorithms, which could enable countermeasures to be taken in advance of the seizure. Those methods, based on information theory, are just as applicable to the EEG time series studied in the past, as they would be for any other set of data from the brain.

For the technorati:

"Measure profile surrogates: A method to validate the performance of epileptic seizure prediction algorithms" 

Information theory is one of the most beautiful and useful inventions ever made.