This is not schizophrenia (though for all I know it may use some of the same hardware, or may be a low-key, non-pathological version of schizophrenia in the same way that a healthy self-preservation instinct could be thought of as a low-key, non-pathological version of a phobia or an anxiety disorder).
This accords with my own sense.
My current central model for schizophrenia starts with Sapoloski’s evolutionary hypothesis (sorry for youtube, it works at 1.75X and I just rewatched all of it to make sure I’m not wasting too much time), which links with how cluster A personality disorders are heritable and occur more frequently in people with schizophrenic parents/cousins.
On this model, a few of these genes make you a tribally useful shaman or successful leader, and get positive selection (hence why the individual alleles exist at non-trivial levels), but too many all at once in the same person can predispose one to fall into a dysfunctional mental attractor.
Cluster A disorders (classicly, the 3 on the left in the diagram below) are then maybe “very mild ‘schizophrenia’, with enough perks to make up for the downsides” and the downside here is evolutionary… so presumably there are phenotypes that have some advantage in some environments?
Basically, Sapolsky thinks these phenotype/niches are spiritual/cognitive roles common to hunter gatherer society (which become dysfunctional in excess).
My favorite is “Schizotypal” which has easily detected hallmarks of: eccentricity in speech and dress. Also, interestingly, in this study it fell out as the purest expression of the “A_s” heritability dimension (without much of the other dimensions). Sauce.
So then my guess is that there are ways of using one’s imagination, and eventually these tip over into clanging and auditory hallicinations of Satan telling you to kill yourself (or whatever).
I find it useful (thinking of hallucinations) to also think of afantasia and then generalize that into all the sensory domains.
Can you “imagine” a taste? …a kinesthetic/tactile feeling? …a smell? …a sound? For some of these things, can you not avoid imagining them, or are you stuck with them?
In each sensory domain the resolution could be high or low, in its own subspace or in the shared one where sense perceptions are, and so on with limits or powers… kinda like dreams (which are potentially a variation on all this)?
I don’t know that I can really imagine “the taste of cinnamon” exactly, but if I try to imagine it, a picture of cinnamon toast pops into my mind (with my childhood kitchen in the background) and my saliva glands sorta tingle and my lips purse as if in expectation of bitterness?
The key dimension here is maybe not the vividness dimension but more precisely: intrusiveness.
I personally mostly don’t have intrusive stuff if I don’t want it. This goes all the way to having an “inner monologue”. I don’t need one mostly that I can tell? If language is specifically useful, rubber ducking often helps, but I don’t have to pretend (that I’ve noticed) that I am the duck, or I am the one talking to the duck, to get the benefit.
Sometimes I’ll remember bad experiences as if in reverie, but that is pretty rare and almost entirely under my control. Sometimes I use my audio memory loop to remember or rehearse speech. Most of my thoughtthoughts are nonverbal (though often they have visual or kinesthetic components). Often my imagination is just silent, or has music playing.
The idea of hearing voices on a regular basis, with no off button, that were also unhelpfully critical initially seemed (once I realized that many people have this) “totally batshit fucking crazy” to me. I remember the moment I realized this might actually be common.
It happened after learning about people with afantasia, and how they sometimes report that “all that talk about pictures in the head was, I thought, just a metaphor”. That gave me sensitivity to “<X> is all just a metaphor” being a template used by people with psychologically false universal theories.
This was a lightning bolt realization I had when wandering through a bookstore grabbing random books and hit my third random self help book with some version of a bit of wisdom about how “we all call ourselves inadequate all the time in our head”. I rolled my eyes (again) at this (essentially false to my experience) metaphor… and then it struck me that maybe it IS NOT A METAPHOR for “so many people that this author thinks it is universal”?!?
After that point I started asking people about their inner “imagination in general” experiences… and I discovered seemingly highly normal people (often quite smart, and maybe with some shaman genes?) could imagine things so vividly (often sounds or sights) that it was indistinguishable to them from “real perception” except that they know it is fake because they can control it and no one else sees or hears it. It is just imagining in EITHER or BOTH of the private mental workspace or “the workspace where sensory data lands” to them.
But then ear worms could often not be banished by people. Like in general, intrusive ear worms seem to be quite common.
But supposing one’s ear worms were very high quality, and had a mentally simulated source location in their visible space, and (like ear worms in general) you couldn’t turn it off… then it could be annoying. A useful technique was to keep GOOD music available, not to stop having an earworm (an impossibility for some?) but rather to change the channel <3
This loops back, for me, to this assertion by you:
It’s important to be clear that the experience of “hearing the voices” actually happens, in many people. This is not a metaphor, and it is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I’m not saying that people tend to hallucinate actual sounds—that probably would be schizophrenia. But in the same way that most people “hear” their own thoughts, people also “hear” the voice of their dad (or “see” his facial expression), offering thoughts or advice or reacting in real time to the current situation.
I suspect that for tens of thousands of years, there were no books, and so things like griot songs and homeric poety were the best form of inter-generational idea transmission that existed.
This plausibly was culturally useful enough to have evolutionary implications for making us “genetically better at culture”?
Thus, in general, I focus on adaptiveness (for what is good) and intrusiveness (for bad things that can not be controlled). Skilled controlled musical “hallucination” is probably not necessarily maladaptive.
What about other skilled controlled imagined material?
This gets around to the point that Gunnar makes which is that I think some people have ONE big privileged special Tulpa that they think “is themselves”.
To go further, I think some people have a special Tulpa like this, which assumes and extends the assumption, in its imagined speech performance, that it is, in fact, “the person themself”.
With the “me tulpa” conceptually bound to the “actual me” symbol in an identity relationship, the tulpa’s performance comes to be called “my inner monologue” and its speech (true, false, bullshit, funny, or whatever) is NOT treated as “merely an inner monologue from an imaginary friend, named after and inspired by my total self, whose shape and actions are generated according to a huge number of criteria, many of which have nothing to do with epistemology”.
Instead the person just thinks, roughly “my inner monologue just IS my thought and so my inner monologue is the totality of my cognition”. Maybe?
If this is true, then the whole Inner Simulator part of the CFAR curriculum is perhaps a way to get these people (without having to do an enormous extended explanation of what they might be routing around) to tap into the mental powers that are not normally recruited by their Self Tulpa, but which do exist in their brain...
...with the practical upshot of helpfully using parts of their brain that their Self Tulpa often does not regularly use (and which are perhaps less liable to the rounding errors and half-truths inherent in mere speech).
Ben Pace has an interesting sequence of comments (click and read up and down (it is not just the one comment)) about removing shoulder advisors that are problematic. I’m not sure if it would be safe to apply Ben’s techniques to the removal of the central shoulder adviser? Deciding that a Self Tulpa doesn’t deserve social status (while at the same time not making clear that the real person does, because everyone deserves care, but also because the tulpa isn’t the totality of the real person, and is just a tulpa, and so on) seems like it could have bad side effects if not done very very carefully.
I think Buddhism has techniques here… but also i think maybe some of these techniques were designed by psychos trying to herd a bunch of teenagers into submissive participation in armies as soldiers? So: approach with caution?
And in the meantime… maybe tulpas are great! Maybe the more tulpas the merrier?
I think I’ve internalized (from the same source as you) that a lot of “metaphors” about thought are just things I experience differently from a given author. Despite this, I hadn’t realized that the “voice of self doubt” is literally a voice, and polled my fiance to check (she said it is).
I feel like some of these should be a day’s worth of learning in a standard education.
I’m fascinating by the mechanisms here! You said:
This accords with my own sense.
My current central model for schizophrenia starts with Sapoloski’s evolutionary hypothesis (sorry for youtube, it works at 1.75X and I just rewatched all of it to make sure I’m not wasting too much time), which links with how cluster A personality disorders are heritable and occur more frequently in people with schizophrenic parents/cousins.
On this model, a few of these genes make you a tribally useful shaman or successful leader, and get positive selection (hence why the individual alleles exist at non-trivial levels), but too many all at once in the same person can predispose one to fall into a dysfunctional mental attractor.
Cluster A disorders (classicly, the 3 on the left in the diagram below) are then maybe “very mild ‘schizophrenia’, with enough perks to make up for the downsides” and the downside here is evolutionary… so presumably there are phenotypes that have some advantage in some environments?
Basically, Sapolsky thinks these phenotype/niches are spiritual/cognitive roles common to hunter gatherer society (which become dysfunctional in excess).
So then my guess is that there are ways of using one’s imagination, and eventually these tip over into clanging and auditory hallicinations of Satan telling you to kill yourself (or whatever).
I find it useful (thinking of hallucinations) to also think of afantasia and then generalize that into all the sensory domains.
Can you “imagine” a taste? …a kinesthetic/tactile feeling? …a smell? …a sound? For some of these things, can you not avoid imagining them, or are you stuck with them?
In each sensory domain the resolution could be high or low, in its own subspace or in the shared one where sense perceptions are, and so on with limits or powers… kinda like dreams (which are potentially a variation on all this)?
I don’t know that I can really imagine “the taste of cinnamon” exactly, but if I try to imagine it, a picture of cinnamon toast pops into my mind (with my childhood kitchen in the background) and my saliva glands sorta tingle and my lips purse as if in expectation of bitterness?
The key dimension here is maybe not the vividness dimension but more precisely: intrusiveness.
I personally mostly don’t have intrusive stuff if I don’t want it. This goes all the way to having an “inner monologue”. I don’t need one mostly that I can tell? If language is specifically useful, rubber ducking often helps, but I don’t have to pretend (that I’ve noticed) that I am the duck, or I am the one talking to the duck, to get the benefit.
Sometimes I’ll remember bad experiences as if in reverie, but that is pretty rare and almost entirely under my control. Sometimes I use my audio memory loop to remember or rehearse speech. Most of my thought thoughts are nonverbal (though often they have visual or kinesthetic components). Often my imagination is just silent, or has music playing.
The idea of hearing voices on a regular basis, with no off button, that were also unhelpfully critical initially seemed (once I realized that many people have this) “totally batshit fucking crazy” to me. I remember the moment I realized this might actually be common.
It happened after learning about people with afantasia, and how they sometimes report that “all that talk about pictures in the head was, I thought, just a metaphor”. That gave me sensitivity to “<X> is all just a metaphor” being a template used by people with psychologically false universal theories.
This was a lightning bolt realization I had when wandering through a bookstore grabbing random books and hit my third random self help book with some version of a bit of wisdom about how “we all call ourselves inadequate all the time in our head”. I rolled my eyes (again) at this (essentially false to my experience) metaphor… and then it struck me that maybe it IS NOT A METAPHOR for “so many people that this author thinks it is universal”?!?
After that point I started asking people about their inner “imagination in general” experiences… and I discovered seemingly highly normal people (often quite smart, and maybe with some shaman genes?) could imagine things so vividly (often sounds or sights) that it was indistinguishable to them from “real perception” except that they know it is fake because they can control it and no one else sees or hears it. It is just imagining in EITHER or BOTH of the private mental workspace or “the workspace where sensory data lands” to them.
But then ear worms could often not be banished by people. Like in general, intrusive ear worms seem to be quite common.
But supposing one’s ear worms were very high quality, and had a mentally simulated source location in their visible space, and (like ear worms in general) you couldn’t turn it off… then it could be annoying. A useful technique was to keep GOOD music available, not to stop having an earworm (an impossibility for some?) but rather to change the channel <3
This loops back, for me, to this assertion by you:
Sapolsky’s actual lecture on schizophrenia helps make clear that the full blown version of schizophrenia is just really bad, really complicated, and related to an objectively broken brain (I have re-watched the full video at 1.75X, and it is pretty good but it mostly is just linked here to give Sapolsky a second chance to talk about the subject with a different (and more boring) kind of nuance than the video I started with.)
However, breaking down the mechanisms, and the sensory imagination/hallucination/dream aspects…
....I think the concepts “ego syntonic” and “adaptive” are very useful here.
I suspect that for tens of thousands of years, there were no books, and so things like griot songs and homeric poety were the best form of inter-generational idea transmission that existed.
This plausibly was culturally useful enough to have evolutionary implications for making us “genetically better at culture”?
Thus, in general, I focus on adaptiveness (for what is good) and intrusiveness (for bad things that can not be controlled). Skilled controlled musical “hallucination” is probably not necessarily maladaptive.
What about other skilled controlled imagined material?
In “Personality Characteristics of Tulpamancers and Their Tulpas” they find some evidence that many pairs (mancer and mancee) reported mutual satisfaction. So that seems like maybe sometimes it isn’t maladaptive?
Or at least it is sometimes not ego dystonic?
This gets around to the point that Gunnar makes which is that I think some people have ONE big privileged special Tulpa that they think “is themselves”.
To go further, I think some people have a special Tulpa like this, which assumes and extends the assumption, in its imagined speech performance, that it is, in fact, “the person themself”.
With the “me tulpa” conceptually bound to the “actual me” symbol in an identity relationship, the tulpa’s performance comes to be called “my inner monologue” and its speech (true, false, bullshit, funny, or whatever) is NOT treated as “merely an inner monologue from an imaginary friend, named after and inspired by my total self, whose shape and actions are generated according to a huge number of criteria, many of which have nothing to do with epistemology”.
Instead the person just thinks, roughly “my inner monologue just IS my thought and so my inner monologue is the totality of my cognition”. Maybe?
If this is true, then the whole Inner Simulator part of the CFAR curriculum is perhaps a way to get these people (without having to do an enormous extended explanation of what they might be routing around) to tap into the mental powers that are not normally recruited by their Self Tulpa, but which do exist in their brain...
...with the practical upshot of helpfully using parts of their brain that their Self Tulpa often does not regularly use (and which are perhaps less liable to the rounding errors and half-truths inherent in mere speech).
Ben Pace has an interesting sequence of comments (click and read up and down (it is not just the one comment)) about removing shoulder advisors that are problematic. I’m not sure if it would be safe to apply Ben’s techniques to the removal of the central shoulder adviser? Deciding that a Self Tulpa doesn’t deserve social status (while at the same time not making clear that the real person does, because everyone deserves care, but also because the tulpa isn’t the totality of the real person, and is just a tulpa, and so on) seems like it could have bad side effects if not done very very carefully.
I think Buddhism has techniques here… but also i think maybe some of these techniques were designed by psychos trying to herd a bunch of teenagers into submissive participation in armies as soldiers? So: approach with caution?
And in the meantime… maybe tulpas are great! Maybe the more tulpas the merrier?
I think I’ve internalized (from the same source as you) that a lot of “metaphors” about thought are just things I experience differently from a given author. Despite this, I hadn’t realized that the “voice of self doubt” is literally a voice, and polled my fiance to check (she said it is).
I feel like some of these should be a day’s worth of learning in a standard education.
Yeah, I am indeed toying around with a 100-ish-day curriculum of such insights.