{"id":114,"date":"2008-03-14T09:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T17:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=114"},"modified":"2008-03-14T09:10:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-14T17:10:00","slug":"in-praise-of-mpd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=114","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of MPD"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month’s New Scientist<\/i> carries an opinion piece<\/a> by Rita Carter, author of the imminent Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality<\/a><\/i>. She’s not the first to argue that multiple personalities may be adaptive (the whole backbone of the eighties’ MPD fad was that they served to protect the primary persona from the stress of extreme abuse), nor is she the first to point out that MPD is just one end of a scale that goes all the way down to jes’ plain folks adopting different faces for different social contexts (what Carter calls “normal multiplicity”). She does, however, suggest that “normal multiplicity could prove useful in helping people function in an increasingly complex world”; which raises the possibility that what we now think of as “pathological” multiplicity might prove useful in a hyper<\/i>complex world.<\/p>\n

Cue the Gang of Four.<\/p>\n

This is one of the themes introduced in Blindsight<\/i> that I’m going to town on with Dumbspeech<\/i> (okay, okay: State of Grace<\/i>): that humanity is, in effect, splitting into a whole suite of specialized cognitive subspecies as a means of dealing with information overload. (You can see the rudiments of this in the high proportion of Aspies hanging out in Silicon Valley, perhaps.) But I’ve never encountered this Carter person before. Judging by her brief essay, I can’t tell whether she’s actually on to something or whether she’s just putting neurogloss lipstick on the trivially obvious fact that it makes sense to behave differently in different situations (rather like making the Atkins Diet sound all high-tech and futuristic by describing it as “hacking the body”).<\/p>\n

Anyone here read her books? Are they any good?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month’s New Scientist carries an opinion piece by Rita Carter, author of the imminent Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality. She’s not the first to argue that multiple personalities may be adaptive (the whole backbone of the eighties’ MPD fad was that they served to protect the primary persona from the stress of extreme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-blindsight","category-neuro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}