Re: Hilgard's "hidden observer"

From: rmiller <rmiller.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:12:25 -0500

At 10:53 PM 6/26/2005, rmiller wrote:
>At 03:44 PM 6/26/2005, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>>Dear Richard,
>>
>> Let me follow up on your suggestion: Assuming a "personality" is made
>> up of multiple modules,does it necessarily follow that a "hidden
>> observer" exist as a seperate entiry, or could it be that the usual
>> single personality results from an entrainment (the modules become like
>> oscillators that couple to each other) over the many modules?
>
>Hilgard asked the "entity" that question more than a few times. The
>hidden observer came across as quite normal-sounding. reasonable and
>real. A Finnish psychologist by the name of Reima Kampmann made an
>extensive study of the phenomenon, but unfortunately published little--and
>what he did publish was never translated to any languages other than
>Finnish. Bottom line: The hidden observer seems to be as real as such
>entities can be--or perhaps as real as some of the better business
>CEOs. Certainly better than some of the former CEOs in the news
>lately. Otherwise, it appears that the hidden observer phenom has not
>been studied in depth. I haven't seen much published research.
>
>> This idea predicts that if this entrainment mode is unstable and
>> there are other possible metastale entrainment modes possible, then the
>> personality that emerges is unstable; we get the symptons of
>> multiple-personality disorder that makes "personalities" analogous to
>> the metastable (phase space) orbits of a chaotic system.
>> If no stable or metastable entrainments between the multiple modules
>> obtain, we have the symptoms of autism. No?
>
>Autism supposedly has been associated with structural changes based upon
>CT cans. Beyond that I don't know enough about autism to
>comment. Ornstein suggests that multiple-personalities are rather
>normal. On the other hand, there are some great books out there about
>this complex and weird phenom. For those who think the brain is just a
>complex radio set, multiple personality disorder can be thought of as
>merely having a crummy tuner (coil?) or a bad antenna. Melvin Morse, a
>Seattle pediatrician suggested that there is an antenna of a sort--and
>it's located in the right temporal sulcus. According to his books, this
>area also serves as some sort of ejection seat for the soul. I wrote a
>novel a few years ago that hypothesized a specific EEG signal emanating
>from this area (resolved using a standard Fast Fourier Transform
>circuit.) By monitoring the wavelet coming from this area, one could
>determine the time of exit for an OOBE.
>
>Rich M
>
>. . .Fiction, of course. Still, it might be interesting to see if there
>are EEG changes that occur as personalities in the MPE patient switch on
>and off. I've heard that each personality presents a unique EEG--which,
>if true, might support your model.
Received on Mon Jun 27 2005 - 00:44:32 PDT