In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one example and a passage from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge’s poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend’s take a walk through the countryside. Thought the process of actively imagining his friends enjoying themselves, the disconsolate poet pulls himself out of his funk to the point that he is able to bless them in their journey. The passage from Tom Sawyer mirrored something I did as a child when I was sent to my room as punishment for something I’d done wrong. I would imagine that my parents were lamenting my death and their imagined lamentations would enable me to feel better. The passage from Tom Sawyer was more or less like that, though a bit grander, as befits Tom’s sense of himself. Tom and his friends had run off to the river and the townspeople began searching the river for their drowned bodies. When he realized what was going on, Tom snuck into his Aunt Polly’s house at night and listened to the women commiserate over the deaths of their boys. It made him feel good. The point is a simple one: we use poems and stories to regulate our emotional life.
In the second article, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, I introduced the concept of state-dependent memory, which holds the our memories are chemically keyed to the neurochemicals active during the experiences themselves. Thus, I suggested, “if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole?” Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit,” as an example, I went on to argue that literature, and art more generally, provides a (neurochemically) neutral ground giving us access to a full range experience. And this allows us to construct a coherent sense of self.
What happens if, however, the process of constructing a self fails?
Autobiography and Dissociated Identity Disorder
In relatively rare extreme cases, a person can exhibit dissociative identity disorder.
In the 1990 Antonio Damasio articulated a theory of the neural self in two different books: Descartes’ Error, and The Feeling of What Happens. Damasio distinguishes between a core facet that is an integrated representation of one’s body states and an autobiographical facet. These selves—Damasio does refer to these systems as selves even as he refers to the neural self to mean both of these systems—are best conceived as processes, not things, and are subserved by extensive networks. Neither of these processes is the master process that runs the whole show—Damasio rejects the notion of such a process. As its name suggests, the autobiographical self organizes the historical events of one’s life and imagines future events. The core self organizes sensations from the body’s interior milieu and somesthetic and kinesthetic senses into an on-going evaluation of one’s current body state.
But I’m not interested in the core self. I’m interested in the autobiographical self. In particular, in the problem of establishing a continuous and routinely accessible representation of the events of one’s life.
Let’s approach this indirectly by considering dissociative identity disorder (DID), an extreme pathology in which the neural self is fractured. In DID, also known as multiple personality disorder, one biological individual exhibits several different identities, each having different memories and personal style. In Thigpen and Cleckley’s classic, The 3 Faces of Eve (1957), Eve had three personalities; Flora Rheta Schreiber’s (1973) Sybil had sixteen. Although there has been some controversy over whether or not DID is real or simply the effect of zealous therapeutic invention and intervention, there is no doubt that at least some cases are genuine (Schachter, Searching for Memory 1996, 236-242).
These different identities have different personal histories. The events in one personal history typically are unknown to the other histories. Each identity will have blank periods in its history, intervals, obviously, where another identity was being enacted. And the different “persons” are often unaware of one another. Further, the different identities seem to have different personal styles, different modes of speech, of movement, of dress, and so forth. Thus both the core and autobiographical selves seem to be riven.
We do not, so far as I know, understand why or how DID happens. It is not, however, the result of the sort of gross destruction of brain tissue that underlies anosognosia. Noting that different the identities seem to favor different moods and that “memories established in one mood state are often more readily recalled in that same mood state than in a different one,” Daniel Schachter (p. 238) suggests that “different moods and roles come to be labeled with separate names. Different selves emerge to handle different desires and emotions.” This suggests problems with brain neurochemistry. We are dealing with state-dependent memory, which I discussed in the previous article.
My suggestion about DID, then, is that the mechanism that switches between one identity and another is fundamentally neurochemical. Each identity favors a particular range of biochemical states. An identity becomes regnant when brain neurochemistry favors it. The perceptions and memories relevant to the modes of that identity will become easily arousable while those relevant to other modes will be all but impossible to arouse. Among individuals unaffected by DID the neurochemical milieu will bias cortical tissue toward a particular set of perceptions and memories but will not necessarily make other perceptions and memories impossible to reconstruct. In the case of DID this neurochemical process is taken to an extreme where whole ranges of perceptions and memories become absolutely unavailable depending on what neurochemicals are currently active. The state space of the brain has become fractured along neurochemical lines, breaking the self into many selves.
Of course, one doesn’t have to think about this model too long before suspecting that it gives us more than we’ve bargained for. After all, neurochemistry is known to be implicated in various neurological and psychiatric problems, and one can easily imagine it to be implicated in problems where we currently have no specific knowledge. But ALL THAT is not my immediate concern. For my purposes it is enough to note that neurochemistry thus seems to present a barrier to autobiographical continuity. One does not automatically have access to all the events the brain has registered. Autobiographical continuity is not given in the nature of the nervous system. The continuity and coherence of the neural self depends on complex matters of the neurochemistry of mood and emotion.
If our memories for life events are keyed to neurochemistry, then how can we possibly remember the events of our life at any time and place? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn’t part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person’s biochemical state, it is still the same apple. If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?
What About Play?
In the previous piece I suggested that art provides us means of maintaining biographical continuity. What about play?
In play acting one deliberately assumes a different identity. One chooses to act like another and does so for a limited period of time. When the time is over one returns to one’s own identity without, generally, ever having completely lost touch with that identity. Play acting is thus different from identity switching in DID, which is involuntary.
Children routinely engage in pretense during play. While adults are less likely to engage in play acting, one can certainly argue that reading novels and stories and seeing movies and plays involves something very like pretending to someone else. You may not enact another person through gesture and voice, but you identify with fictional characters, enacting their feelings and desires in your nervous system, in your core self, and constructing autobiographies for them.
Just as you can, in appropriate circumstances, reconstruct events from your past so vividly that you re-experience the feelings that attended them, so you can treat events in the life of a fictional character as though that life was your own and thereby experience that imaginary life as your own. Beyond this, of course, skilled actors can enter into a role quite deeply, creating physical and vocal styles appropriate to the character, imagining a lifetime of events in the character’s life, and not just those depicted in the script. In the case of a good actor the transformation can be so great that one is confronted with the question of whether or not the actor becomes the character.
Is it possible, then, the play-acting and story-telling are the keys to autobiographical continuity? To be sure, on is not re-enacting the events of one’s own life, nor is one reading about one’s own life. But the events on re-enacts, imaginatively in play or in reading, they are very often like events from one’s own life. And the fictitious story places all these events, and their respective emotions of anger, fear, joy, desire, sorrow, love, and excitement, into a single coherent framework, that of the story. Is it the case, then, that we construct the true story of our life on the basis of the many fictions we’ve played, read, and watch on the screen?
Now, let us move from play, to ritual and to theater. Here we are dealing with imagined events, highly stylized in the case of ritual, somewhat more freely expressed in the case of theater, that are enacted before and on behalf of a community. Everyone sees and experiences, everyone knows, and knows that everyone knows, the same actions and events. Those events and actions are thus validated by the community. They are what we are.
Kenneth Burke of literature
Consider Kenneth Burke’s essay on “Literature as Equipment for Living” from The Philosophy of Literary Form, originally published in the 1930s. Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298):
… surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one’s campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”
The, more or less, is what I’ve been arguing, but in an intellectual context unavailable to Burke. We are physical beings. Our thoughts and emotions are embodied in physical processes. And those physical processes require socially mediated regulation through the medium of play, of art. These imagined events form the basis for our ability to make sense of real events.
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