275. The Disrupted Mind (5)
2 (47m 34s):
That everything's a process. There's no substance. So I don't think the self is a substance. I think it is a process. And as a president, as an outgrowth of this, these interoceptive mechanisms going on, which partake of our proprioception, that means ever since our self in space and of X, you know, X perception or perception of the outer world, interception being the sense of our inability. And that is, and this wind disturbance is an intercept of processes, which are these processes of corresponds, but no brain body conversation that then result in disturbances in the sense of self. And thus, what's really interesting, what's being studied today and so a lot.
2 (48m 18s):
And so it's very, and again, still, I still think there can be beyond these changes. And even in the case of, of probably memory problems, like in the case of dementia, what happened to my mum? There is a sense that there was a kind of, yes, a kind of physiologic, basic, basic physiological core self that does remain. I mean, in the case of Alzheimer's does not seem to affect the emotions so much at all, actually. And so there's a large aspect of the selfhood, which is maybe no longer, very conscious, but that is what it's not met their presentation. We're not aware of having that particular client of being, which is made of memories and so on, but, or of emotions.
2 (49m 7s):
But there's emotional core that my mother preserved in my case, if my mum remains remained indeed part of her core self. So at a kind of basic level of self, and of course I'm able to interact with me at an effective way. So no longer cognitively, so conversation Wentz was gone. I mean, we could no longer really have a conversation. So this kind of thing we're doing now, which we all do in the world of normality was gone. I, I use the word at some point, I play with a word of executive because this idea of executive executive system. So a lot of patients had what the doctors called this executive syndrome.
2 (49m 53s):
So meaning disturbances in this executive system, which is responsible for planning indeed is pretty metacognitive planning, putting things together, deriving meanings, and so on and so forth. There are debates as to actually whether that system should be called that. I put that in a note, but that's a different story. But in a sense, I played with this idea of, you know, we live in a world of executive diaries, right? We take for granted that we, we can plan our lives. We are professionals, we're doing things we're capable. We tweaked with do area. This is our life, right? And so when is no longer able to have what goes, you know, when this executive dysfunction, the no longer part of the ordinary diary of humanity,
1 (50m 37s):
Right?
2 (50m 38s):
But emotionally, she's still there. Thank God yet. And as agnosia, she wasn't aware that she'd lost this capacities and she still could enjoy, there was still joy. There was still a lot of, and the primary emotion or case was joy in some patients that can be different emotions, sadly, her case, it was joy. She'd never been happier than she was during those lessons, especially last year, her life. And it's also fantastic where I'm want to salute as
1 (51m 8s):
I take it. You would reject that kind of postmodern view of mental illness or brain disorders like this say someone like Michelle Fuko or Thomas saws who argue that there's no such thing as mental illness. This is a social construct. It began in the 15 hundreds or whatever date that was Michelle Fuko announced as the start of mental illness. It's just society defining people as deviant and then locking them away rather than say, in the middle ages or before they would have just been, you know, quirky uncle Sam. And he has these weird things, but he's part of our family and he fits in the community in some constructive way. What are your thoughts on that?
2 (51m 48s):
Oh gosh, it's really cold there. We need another hour and a half on that front. It's a great question. Well, all the, all of them have been great questions, but all right. So sure. I mean the category of mental illness is definitely a constructed category. We do live with it now. It's not because category is constructed that it's not real. It's the same issue with emotions as constructs. These FM embarrassing. We can everything's because, because we give names to emotions, that's all. No, it's not, I'm not a nominalist, let's put it this way. I think there's a confusion here.
2 (52m 28s):
You can perfectly well that, except that there are cultural constructions to the way interpretation, cultural interpretations to the categories, reuse, sorry that the categories we use are cultural and to pertain culturally conditioned interpretation's of what we are experiencing that does not mean that there is not something your experience. So I'm not a nominalist. So I think there there's something in between. We can be here. I have the case in the, in the book of, of this, of medical Tucson, this Haitian man, you might've had him in mind with this question who comes in saying that he's hears voices because he's been Bewitched by people back home.
2 (53m 15s):
And the doctors took very seriously his own interpretation because it was just as real as everything else, medically, what was happening, something different, the two levels of interpretation. And certainly, I mean, it's, it could be that some which could have helped him, but probably not. And this is where yeah, I do draw a line because of course there is such a thing as scientific, you know, scientific, raw science and scientific knowledge and it's, which does give us a lot of insights into our biology and the rest of reality.
2 (54m 5s):
So we do need to have to re to keep again, it's again, we return to the category of the pathology. Norman pathological, Josh <inaudible> was more of an influence on me. So it was this opposite connection between him and Fuko, but he, he was much more of an influence on me. And you were the <inaudible> the normal and the pathological, which is precisely really trying to unpack if you like, what, you know, what these two categories really represent, but not denying ever that there was such a thing as a pathology. And if you think about it, I mean, even in non Western cultures, pathologies recognize as such, it might have a different name, but it's recognized this much, you know, you have different ways of dealing with madness, but there was different various words for that outside the ordinary, right outside the groove.
2 (55m 7s):
We have ways now of helping people who go, no, it's like, like in psychosis, which is also a Western term, of course, but we do have ways of helping. So I think it's important to acknowledge actually I do think it's important to acknowledge social constructions. I don't deny that. I, but I think we have to remember that it's, it's a construction of something that is real, so that there is a, there is a very strong, I mean, I'm a scientific realist in this sense, right? A very strong, scientific, real, and I think it can be very dangerous to use this, the fact that we have cultural conditionings, that we are cultural beings to use that as a, as an excuse for relativism, that's it, that's also a philosophical conversation, not I'm now involved.
2 (56m 2s):
I mean, I'm writing to resume a writing of a book that's quite late on the founder founder of, of, of cultural anthropology in America, friends, boss. So I'm actually going from psychology now to anthropology. So I'm thinking very deeply not, but these issues of culture and the mind, and actually there is one there's one, a anthropologist in Emory called Bradshaw who wrote a book called culture in mind, where he argues that actually boys himself was responsible for reasons that inherent in his own extremely important agenda for splitting apart psychology and the social sciences.
2 (56m 43s):
So, and I think it's because of that split between biological reality, shared nervous system, nervous system wish that all humans, Sharon so-and-so and the social input and social cultural diversity that we have this problems and that we, that, that for cool also came up with that issue. I think it's important to retrieve some of this, you know, where are these two areas meet? Whether the culture nature dichotomy is a complete illusion and it's a very dangerous one.
1 (57m 19s):
Yeah. Right. So to one culture, the patient presenting with symptoms looks like witchcraft to another culture. It looks like demon possession to do a Western culture. It looks like a disorder of dopamine or whatever the neurochemical transmitter substance problem is or whatever it is. But your point is that it, that those all work in their different cultures. But if you actually want to treat the patient, you know, burning women as witches or performing an exorcism is not gonna be as effective as say, giving the patient some medical treatment, an actual, you know, kind of psychiatric medical treatment.
2 (58m 2s):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm afraid. So, I mean, I think it's the case. I mean, it's important to say this today when there's so many people believe all sorts of strange things about the vaccines and the root causes of stress, you know, strange beliefs. I mean, you know, something about that and it's, again, the, the strange beliefs are philosophical conundrum, but it's also a cultural phenomenon. And historically it has its history. It has historical roots as well as always been such. There's always been these right. But I mean, this, I think it is this rejection of this idea that science tells us anything other than what witchcraft tells us well, that's wrong. That's just simply not true. And I think we have to, you have to,
1 (58m 45s):
I mentioned that abnormal psych course I took this was that the time when Robert Rosenhan ran that kind of pseudo experiment, which he and his graduate students had themselves committed to mental hospitals in the United States complaining of hearing voices. And then the task was, see if you can get out on your own. Right. But most of them got in, they were diagnosed with some psychosis. He claimed and, and then they had a hard time getting out and that they, after they were admitted, he says they acted perfectly normally. And, and the psychiatrists at these different hospitals supposedly diagnose them with various disorders.
1 (59m 26s):
Like one of them took a lot of notes. She was bored. So she was just taking notes about what the patients were doing and how the doctors were treating them. And so on. And that she was then diagnosed with like a logorrhea excessive writing behavior is presented by the patient or, and another one was a painter. And so she's bored painting. And oh, you can see in her paintings here, her neuroses is erupting in the color red or whatever it was. Okay. So I I've written about that. I always thought it was a powerful statement on the, you know, the power of words or diagnoses to misinterpret what somebody is doing. But now that study's been challenged that, you know, he made up a lot of this stuff and that, you know, maybe some of these people didn't actually even get into these mental hospitals and, and the, and the second part of the experiment may not have even been run where he said, all right, I'm going to send some patients in after these psychiatric hospitals complained about this study because it was pretty famous and he didn't send any in, but they said that they did.
