Multiple Personality Disorder part 2 of 2

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is maladaptive because of a number of traits of the disorder. First of all, personalities are rarely aware of what the other personalities know/do which makes it difficult on the other personalities when they switch. For example with Julie, when the Marlena personality came out, she would often go out with strange guys, get scared, and retreat inside leaving Julie (who didn’t get herself into the situation) to sort out the mess. When she finds herself in these situations, Julie feels lost confused and is often in some degree of danger. The other personalities can also make it difficult to work a regular job. Julie had a rough time trying to get the younger personalities from coming out and playing or crying while she was at work because she obviously can’t suddenly sit down on the floor and play with a toy.

MPD is also very exhausting for people around the person. Since people with MPD do not remember (essentially black out) when the other personalities come out, they often do not sleep very much. The relations of people with MPD will often get phone calls in the middle of the night because one of the personalities is having a bad night or just wants to talk.

Another ‘side effect’ of MPD is that the main personality rarely knows about the others, and if any of the other personalities know about the others, they will not seek treatment because they do not want to go away. MPD is often misdiagnosed partially because many psychologists do not believe in its existence, and the symptoms are often difficult to see in a one hour therapy session.

MPD is also very difficult to treat because the treatment involves the therapist spending time with each of the individual personalities and figuring out why they are there and getting them to leave or be absorbed by the dominant personality. This is a very time consuming and difficult process which can take a MPD specialist years to complete successfully.

Multiple Personality Disorder part 1 of 2

MPD is usually developed as a defense mechanism in people who were abused as children. They develop different personalities to deal with different situations. This is an extremely rare disorder in that less than .1% of the population develop MPD in their lifetime. MPD is an amazing defense mechanism in some respects, and very maladaptive in others.

People with MPD can have an essentially limitless number of personalities as they say ‘walking around in their head’ in an attempt to deal with their life situation. Some people merely split themselves in two like Jack/Tyler in Fight Club, and others can develop twenty or more distinct personalities like the character Julie in the book 9 Highland Road.

Jack/Tyler was bored with his life and didn’t like being what he saw as a boring pacifist so he created Tyler to make himself more masculine/spice up his life. This is the stereotype that most people believe MPD conforms to. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona who takes drastic shifts form one personality extreme to the other when the situation calls for it is not the typical MPD case.

Julie in 9 Highland Road is much more standard. Julie has fifteen personalities ranging in age from three to about twenty five. She created them to deal with her very abusive childhood, and they range in personality from promiscuous seventeen year old Marlina to three year old happy-go-lucky Didi to twenty something Abigail who keeps everyone in line.

All of these personalities keep the person from having to deal with the terrible parts of their life. They are about as close to a repressed memory as a person can truly get, but there are some really bad consequences that go along with having MPD.

Continued…

Repressed memory accuracy

Many people are sitting in jail for crimes they did not commit because of recovered memory testimony. In order for memories to need to be recovered, they first need to be repressed. Repressed memories are gone. Memories can be suppressed in that a person can try not to think about a horrible thing so that they can function normally in every day life, but a memory can never truly be repressed (the definition of a repressed memory is that the generally negative experience effects a person’s actions/feelings and that the person would not be able to tell someone why they do something or feel a certain way, just that they do.)

‘Repressed memories’ are recovered through the process of hypnosis. Many people, including the justice system of the United States believe that recovered memories are extremely accurate because of the conviction with which people stand by their memories. Sadly, these memories have basically been planted in their heads without their therapist really meaning to plant them. A patient can go to therapy, and if a therapist asks enough or they talk about the possibility enough, anyone will come up with a possible scenario in their head. After talking about the scenario enough, people will actually believe that this event really happened to them.

This phenomenon is especially visible in children. If a child hears a story enough (especially if they are told the story happened to them), they will not remember if it is an actual memory or if it is just the story they have heard so many times. This is where trials turn into witch hunts. Especially in the case of statutory rape/child abuse, many people question children over the time period before trials about what happened, and if they talk about it enough, they can essentially plant memories in the children’s heads.

I’m not saying that all the time people are lying in cases that use repressed memory testimony, just that people don’t suddenly remember terrible ordeals. That is just not how memory works.

World's smartest man.

In the world of memory, Joshua Foer is a bit of a legend.

Any one who can,

"Memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour. Memorize the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards. Memorize 99 names and faces and recall them in 20 minutes. Memorize 50-line unpublished poems."

deserves a spot of recognition as the Memory Champion of the United States. After months of practice and training in the fine art of memory, Foer, the author of a book on memory, was ready to take on the challenge to be the world's smartest man.

Foer used an interesting technique to beat a United States record by memorizing a shuffled deck o fcards in one minute and forty seconds. Here is what he did:

"in order to be successful in remembering, he needed to assign each bit of information he is given an image. This image would then be placed in a section of your brain called the memory palace. Within the memory palace is a series of rooms, and in order to retrieve the information you have learned, you walk through the palace and go in each room, gathering information."

This is very similar to the concept that if you need to memorize a list of unrelated words, the best way to do so is to make up story about them. Foer is doing just that except that the story is merely a picture that stores his memories.

While few of us will ever have to memorize a deck of cards, this technique reminded me of something my Mom taught me to do to avoid losing things. She said, "put the object that you always lose down (like your keys or your right shoe) and look at it for a second. Make it as big as a house in your mind and say…the giant keys are on top of the stereo." This technique has always worked wonders for me because the second you say to yourself, "where are my keys," you get the image of this giant set of keys squashing the stereo. Foer's model obviously worked for him since he is the new "Smartest Man" in the United States.

Click here to view the originl article on Joshua Foer's amazing accomplishment.

Unconscious routines

This blog is a classic example of how a deadline can remind a person to do something. I generally forget about this assignment from one end of the week to the next (unless I think of a really great topic idea), but when it's Saturday morning, and it is time to actually sit down and write it, I suddenly remember that I have to write 750 words and I get on it.

Deadlines that are consistent are also part of a schedule that we all get used to. I sometimes manage to walk across campus from one class to another with out really realizing where I am going or how I am getting there. I don't need the room numbers after I have been to a class once or twice. In fact, if you asked me for my own address right now, I couldn't tell you what my room number is because I know how to get to my room…so why would I need to know the number?

Then again, if I sat down in the middle of the week and listed out all the things I had to do over the weekend, this blog would be on the list, and if I needed my room number for something, I could probably come up with the number (459).

The moral of this story…

When you see something or do something all the time, you may not consciously know the information or what you need to do, but you will definitely remember when you need to.

Can their craziness affect memory?

Psychology at this point is based heavily on guess work, so any studies that can provide conclusive evidence are greatly needed.

This link is to a study which is trying to determine the effects of having children on memory. This is an interesting topic because not only will it help explain why people lose their minds when they have children, it cnalso be applied to "the think zone."

This study is relevant because it basically studies how having to care for/think about other human beings affects people's memories. This study makes the huge assumption that parent's minds will be more cluttered than the minds of non-parents.

This assumption, while interesting and plausible, is not necessarily correct. Non-parents are more likely to have highly demanding jobs and therefore the possibility of just as much to think about. They do though have more time to think about their own lives because they do not have to deal with kids all the time.

To cut to the chase, if you have completed the 12th grade, you are eligible to participate in this study. I completed the study in about a minute. You only have until Thursday November 20th to help further the psychological community. So please take a minute out of your day.

Whether I like the Weather.

What do you say when you are bundling up on the way out of the house into sub zero weather? I always say, "I can't wait for it to warm up."

What do you say when you are sweating your butt off sitting in little more than your underware drinking Lemonade in the sweltering heat of July? I usually say, "When is it going to finally cool down?"

We all know in the back of our minds that it never stays that very ideal temperature of 70 degrees for more than like A SECOND, but somehow, many people just want to hurry along the seasons.

We forget that it is incredibly miserable on either extreme of the weather spectrum, but also, we always want it to be the other season. I was shocked how fast this happened this year. Almost immediately (on the first 20 degree day after a string of 70 degree days) I started hearing people complaining about how cold it was. But just days before, they had all been complaining about the insane heat. For some reason, people could not just appreciate the sting of the wind on their face even for one day because we know that it's only going to get colder and more biting. The effect is less noticable in the spring than in the fall because people love going outside without their coat, mittens, scarf, hat, and long underwear for the first time in months, but we do eventually forget the novelty and get sick of the heat.

I can't remember...

When I sat down to write for the first couple of weeks of this class, ideas just flowed and everything sounded new and fun, but I have started brain torming recently, and hit a major speed bump. After this many entries, I feel like I am repeating myself. It is getting hard to remember all of the posts, and to keep them all straight.

The organization of this blog itself doesn't help. It is by no means easy to look at a comprehensive list of all blogs. They are listed by month, and you can't really change how you can look at the blog history.

Basically, my memory has finally begun to fail me on this project. I am largely out of ideas and basically exhausted.

Is this too much?

According to the recent article, Surrogate Memory,Pal Pilots can be a huge help to people suffering from sever memory impairments.

People who have suffered strokes, have alzheimer's, or any other cognitive limitation can benefit from the modified palm pilot developed at Baycrest. At Baycrest, people with cognitive impairment take lessons in how to use their palm pilot until they (with their poor memories) can no longer maybe remember how they learned how to use the machine, but they still know how to use it. This is called procedural memory, and works sort of like riding a bike or walking.

The people then need to get in the habit of putting everything they need to do into their palm pilot. The reminders can be easily programmed at any time for any time, and then, when it is time for the person to do something, the palm pilot beeps and they can look at what they need to do.

Great right... Yeah, until they make a mistake. If a person says, "I don't have time right now, I'll put the event in later" chances are they will forget about putting the event in their palm pilot, and thus forget the event. Also, what happens when the person is told drive to an appointment, and they get in the car and can't remember what they did with their keys, or in the case of Alzheimer's Disease, they can't remember what they need to start the car. Then in the process of looking for their keys, they have to wander the house, and maybe bump into a book they were reading and just sit down and read never thinking again about the appointment. And what happens when they look at the date the doctor wrote on the appointment reminder card and put the appointment on say the 16th instead of the 6th?

Palm Pilots are a step above an day planner because they can actually remind you when something needs to happen, but I wonder how effective they would be for someone with severe cognitive impairment. There are so many steps in between being told that you have a doctor's appointment and actually arriving there that too many things can go wrong.

Clutter

When there are so many things happening in a person’s life that they can’t keep them straight, I call that brain clutter. Sometime, classes mush together until you accidently don’t go to class because you remember two of your teachers saying class was canceled, but don’t realize until the next class that the one you showed up for is the one that is canceled, not the one you skipped. OOPS!

The best way to get rid of brain clutter is to do less, but since we can’t very well do that, it is important to make it as easy on your brain. Try to focus on one task at a time, and once it is completed, start on the next one. I have determined that trying to plan ahead too often is also a sure fire way to make your head blow off. If you constantly plan ahead, you have a million projects/ideas/goals that all float freely around in your head. Don’t let them in, and your brain will function much better. Don't over think things.

On the tip of your tongue

While writing, a very common phenomenon is that you know the exact definition of the word you are looking for, but cannot get the exact word out of your mouth. You babble nonsense words to yourself that start with the letter you think the perfect word starts with in the hopes that you will stumble on the correct sound to trigger your memory of the perfect word.

You know that there is only one perfect word that could possibly make your paper awesome, so you sit there talking to yourself trying to find it. When your brain is insufficient, and you feel like you are banging your head on the wall, you ask your roommate, “what is the word that means _____and sounds like ____... Help me." The next step is going to the thesaurus and trying to look up the words that are close, but that rarely works either.

The really frustrating thing is that after you choose the closest word, and after you have printed out the paper, while you are standing in front of the printer or putting the staple in the top left hand corner, you remember the word and smack yourself in the head and forget about it because in the end, the other word got the job done just the same.

Drawing a Blank

Have you ever been thinking about something and then suddenly, the precious little thought that was running through your head is frustratingly GONE! It’s like waking up from a dream and knowing that it was a wonderful dream, but having no idea what about the dream made you so happy.

There are many possible explanations for why these thoughts flee our heads. It could be because you suddenly think of something else on a tangent off of the original thought that drives the original thought out of your head. I was recently working on a group project, and we were trying to cover so many different topics all right after one another that we were getting very confused. A couple of times, one of us would say something that we thought should be included in the paper, and then someone would ask us to repeat the sentence and the recurring response was, “I honestly can’t remember what I just said…What are we talking about again?”

We were trying to do too much too quickly, and it all got jumbled together in one big confused thought. After a while, we would have to take a break because after 6 hours of working with the same group of people, everybody’s brains feel like mush, and mush is really bad at math.