ask anything about DID

I don't see why headspaces would be so hard to believe. I kinda have one and I don't even have a dissociative disorder, just BPD-induced dissociation+maladaptive daydreaming.

 

Wait, define the definition of "headspace" we're talking about here?

 

Aaah, but I now just realize the context of the quote is

So maybe they have a different definition of a headspace than you do?

 

Basically, it's the place where we alters....live, I suppose. It's pretty much just a big field with a forest around it. Supposedly we should be able to manipulate it and build stuff, but uh...all attempts at that have gone puh-retty badly. So....a space inside the body's head, essentially. You can't access the space while you're in front, though. Being in front, I can't see the others, or the headspace, or anything, except what's around the body.

Yeah, I mean, I agree, but Cedar doesn't want to accept it because then that means they've got something in common with the 'faker' systems. Honestly, though, we've seen other supposedly DID-diagnosed systems (exactly one, count 'em, one) talking about having a headspace. So....

 

Maybe? But I mean, our definition of headspace is just 'a space inside the head'. I don't see how else they could define it.

 

Interesting. Sort of a shared dreamspace for when you're not fronting/"conscious"?

And you can talk to each other in it, implying that the brain is simultaneously;

• Enacting normal consciousness
• With motor control and visual processing (which normally engages the parts of the brain that are involved in things like dreaming)
• Generating an entire shared environment;
• From multiple perspectives as different alters, who are
• Each some degree of conscious in their own right.

This would imply that the brain is doing several times the amount of work that it normally does with the same resource set, so, because that seems unlikely, I wonder;

When multiple alters are conscious/aware at once, do you feel "fully" conscious/aware as you might when solely fronting?

Is the "headspace" visceral and real feeling as a real space might be?

When you are not fronting, is you're awareness conscious? Does it vary? You talk about sometimes being aware of things, but not always. Are the different degrees of this?

When you are not fronting, are you fully aware, or is there some dream-like quality to your consciousness? In that in a dream you sometimes feel "on rails" in your actions and not self aware as you are when awake.

Does the quality of consciousness change during co-fronting or when multiple people are "aware"? Do you see shortfalls in things like working memory, logical processing, etc? Is there an even distribution of mental resources, or does this vary, and does the degree to which it varies vary?

(Also, pleased to meet you Yang! Welcome to the forums. It's neat to meet another of the cA crew, and you're a rwby fan, so yay!)

 

1. No, I don't feel fully conscious or aware as I might when fronting; for me, and for the others, being in the headspace and talking is almost like dreaming is for Cedar. They describe dreaming as feeling 'not fully there' and 'not fully awake' and 'everything is hazy'; that's what being in headspace feels like. Headspace also allows for things that would be impossible in real life; for instance, I have wings in headspace. I don't have those in real life, obviously, and it's impossible for anyone to have wings in real life.

2. No, as already mentioned, it feels more dreamlike. There's no temperature, no such thing as cold. If you touch leaves you don't really feel leaves.

3. It varies; sometimes I'm vaguely aware of things, almost as though I'm half awake. Other times I am keenly aware of what's happening around Cedar. Other times I have absolutely no awareness of what's going on around Cedar, and sometimes I get pushed to the front during these kinds of moments and it takes me several minutes to orient myself, which is always very confusing and can even be dangerous if we're, say, driving (though luckily it's never happened while driving). Whether or not I pay full attention to what's happening is entirely up to me, but I feel more 'real' when paying keen attention to the real world, and less 'real' when I'm not focusing on it.

4. There is a dream-like quality to my consciousness when not fronting, yes.

5. When we're co-fronting, it's more of a struggle to remember things and process things, and also more of a struggle to communicate. It's not very noticeable with only two people fronting, but three brings a noticeable difference to working memory and logical processing; Cedar has compared it to trying to run multiple things on a computer. The distribution of mental resources varies depending on who's most 'in control' of the body. If we are equally in control, equal distribution happens, but that equal control is rare and difficult to achieve. Usually, one of us has more control and more mental resources than the other.

(Thank you! It's very interesting and a little overwhelming to meet all of you.)

 

That makes perfect sense! Thank you for answering!

Spoiler

I don't want to say that it's "fascinating" to hear about how all this works because I know that in the context of mental illnesses being told that is often creepy/objectifying, but the fact is a have a really intense interest in how consciousness and the brain works and so this is really interesting to hear about because it gives a lot of insight into the nature of how it all works and I like having lots of perspectives and datapoints aaa

So yes it's very interesting to meet you as well, and also just good because I like meeting new people anyways. Hi!

 

Honestly, I'd rather be told it's fascinating or interesting than weird or scary. You wouldn't believe some of the responses we've gotten from people... And it's pretty cool you have an interest in how it all works! We have a pretty invested interest in how all this works too, because it really is interesting, and it also affects us directly.

 

Most things I've heard about the brain seem to imply that two different consciousness "processes" (for lack of a better word) is pretty much the limit for what can be done whilst maintaining normal function. I think this is partially because most of the brain is duplicated across two halves - and, indeed, if you split the brain down the middle each half will operate seemingly independently fairly well. But there's also a sort of duality in a lot of other ways the brain works as well. Dreaming is an interesting one; the brain sorta splits into two, one half creating a scenario, and the other half experiencing it. Of course, the disadvantage of only having access to half the resources, is that some capability that was encoded elsewhere in the brain is lost or occupied. A good example is how the left and right brain specialize in different functions, and if one is removed or damaged, then that ability is lost until the other half relearns it.

I don't think what happens with alters is quite as simple as that - I would guess that the two different personalities each use various different parts of the brain, maybe even sharing some. I would imagine that the conflict would tie up some resources and so there would be some "shortfall" wherein you can't process certain things as well as usual, but it does make sense that you'd have to push it up to three alters at the same time before the fundamental experience of consciousness would really seem in any way degraded, because the brain in general seems to be able to hold two minds pretty handily.

(I wonder if anybody has ever put somebody in an MRI machine while co-fronting is happening... I will google this! :D)

 

That would make a lot of sense, actually! With three of us at the front, things do start to get degraded, and we've honestly never pushed it beyond that because we aren't sure what would happen and don't really want to push it.

Another thing that's been speculated on, mostly by Cedar's primary doctor, is that having multiple minds active in the brain--not even fronting, just active--might be what's causing our severe memory problems and the drains on our mental energy. Cedar was diagnosed with CFS, because they're constantly tired, and need to sleep at least twelve hours a night to be able to function minimally. Their doctor was wondering if it might be because of the effort their brain is having to put in in order to keep so many personalities running, especially since Cedar describes it as a mental exhaustion, not a physical one. Do you think that's plausible?

...If that hasn't been done, I volunteer us to do it.

 

IIRC, most of the need for sleep in humans usually comes from the brain needing to rest, as just one or two hours is usually enough for the body. So, yeah, that could explain it.

 

(Also, the next time I see Cedar staying up late, I will yell at them. I have an EST clock. I'll do it.)

 

That sounds plausible to me. I'm not expert, but I do imagine that what you guy's brain does is probably if not more energy consuming (and it might well be) then at the least very psychologically tiring.

Oooh, look at this. A drop off in brain activity happens during switching, concentrated around the areas of the brain that deal with long-term memory!

Which makes perfect sense! Because you're probably still all using the same parts of the brain to process your thoughts. What changes is the underlying personality that is utilizing those parts of the brain, so, what this would suggest to me is that when a switch happens, the brain drops the memory threads of one personality, resulting in the momentary activity decrease, then grabs another set, invoking the alter. Which would mean that DID is at least partially rooted in a sort of memory segmentation, which makes a pretty darn fair dash of sense.

There's probably more to it than that, though - would you say that you guys excel in different skill areas, or is it pretty much the same across the board? That could give some insight as to whether access to different "processing" areas changes between personalities. Although, then again, if it does that might just be because the same area is being utilized differently, or because you have different feelings about ability in certain areas, psychologically speaking rather than based on physical available resources to do a specific thing.

 

Actually, I'm unsure whether the video clip was saying that the decrease only happened at the precise moment of switching, or if it started then and continued whilst the alter was fronting.

If the latter rather than the former then it could have been just because that alter has fewer memories than the main personality, which would make sense in that they are a child.

 

We excel in different areas. For instance, Cedar's a killer speed reader--the rest of us are average. Gwen's brilliant in math, but not so much Cedar. Some of us are the same across the board in certain areas, but most of us excel in one area or another and then we're average or below average in other areas. We also have different skills--for instance, Cedar knows how to fence. Me, I don't know the first thing about fencing.

Please do. They really need to stop staying up incredibly late.

 

I'll try, but I also shouldn't stay up late myself, and I'm on European time (that's a 6 hours difference most of the time). I might be able to do it more this summer, though, but it will really depend on what I'll have to do during the day, of course.

 

Understandable. If you happen to be up and see them up late, though...you have my full permission to yell at them.

 

One of the things I've always found fairly interesting about the brain is that quality of consciousness doesn't really seem to correlate too well with things like physical brain size, neuron count, or available resources, etc.

I mean, there is a correlation, but there's a lot of leeway within that. There is a huge amount of variation, for instance, in brain volume between individuals, but this hardly every directly correlates in any simplistic way with ability level of any sort. The same goes for the average brain volume disparity based on secondary sex characteristics. What's more, you can literally cut away one half of brain above the cerebellum and after recovering the patient will appear to, essentially, be entirely ordinary psychologically. This is the same as what we see with different species; whilst large differences will result in a brain with different capabilities; i.e., a monkey has a larger brain than a mouse, and can therefore do more - humans, whilst having relatively large brains overall, are dwarfed by the brains of cetaceans, who on the whole seem to have less "intelligence" in the way that we'd usually define it. At the same time, certain birds seem almost ridiculously capable with their brains - especially birds like parrots, who seem to be on par with some great apes in some instances - despite the fact that their brain volume is a small fraction of ours.

Where I'm going with this is that consciousness is super interesting because it doesn't appear that the degree to which you are able to enact consciousness is dependent on things like neuron/synapse counts. I'd think this is probably because a large part of what the brain does is not in fact "consciousness" at all, but rather things like long-term memory, passive sensory processing, and subconscious control tasks that don't infringe on our experience of reality. What seems to matter moreover is the amount of brain-space given over to consciousness, both in terms of underlying architecture (why humans are more intelligent than other animals) and in terms of the individual's own situation! This is why it seems to be possible to be fairly normally conscious, as a human, even when the resources available to you are very much reduced - hence you can still be conscious normally after a hemispherectomy, or, in this instance, why to alters can co-exist and both be conscious, without a corresponding halving in mental ability. The brain is very fluid and plastic, and you have to stretch its ability very far to see any significant shortfall in its ability to maintain mostly normal consciousness - i.e., you have to go into three-alter territory for that to happen. Evolutionary, this is a huge advantage, because it means that many brain injuries - even massively traumatic ones - can be survived, and normal function restored. It also means that things like DID with co-fronting are possible. The brain is an incredible and versatile machine!

 

Huh, that's really interesting!! The brain is pretty incredible.