Sunday 6 July 2008

Do we all have multiple persons in our heads?

In the reading "Culture and Mental Illness", one of the disorders that Hartmann discusses is multiple-personality disorder (2007). But might we all suffer from this mental disorder? Philosophers since Hume (1711 - 1776) have theorised that the mind may not be the single entity that it seems to be, and recent research from psychology has tended to support this view: it appears we all have multiple persons inside our heads.

One recent piece of research that has been seen as giving further support to the multiple-persons theory of the human mind concerns an unexpected finding about the accuracy of guesses we make. The main ideas are outlined in "The Crowd Within" (2008), and the short report of the original research by Edward Vul and Harold Pashler (2008) is also worth a look at. It is difficult, but very interesting and I don't think too difficult. It is also fairly short, being just eight pages. The journal Psychological Science also hosts a Blog discussion on this topic (Herbert, 2008), which you might like to have a look at, both for Herbert's post and the following discussion.

Did these results surprise you?
Do they support the idea that persons are really collections of persons, that we are all multiple personalities inside our brains?
How do you feel about that idea?
Most of us think of ourselves as being a single person. Could we really all be wrong? If enough research proved otherwise, would you accept that your mind was really a whole collection of minds? (Or something like that)
_____________

References

The crowd within. (2008, June 26). [Electronic version]. The Economist. Retrieved July 6, 2008 from https://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11614183

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill ESL/ELT.

Herbert, W. (2008, June 10). Polling the crowd within. We're Only Human. Retrieved July 6, 2008 from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfm

Vuh, E. & Pashler, H. (2008, in press). Measuring the Crowd Within: Probabilistic Representations Within Individuals [Short report]. Psychological Science. Retrieved July 6, 2008 from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/ps/19_7_inpress/vul.pdf

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