Personalities within a person

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This is less of a topic that I mean to steer so much as I want to forum-source a question I have and admittedly when it comes to neurology research there are a lot of reserved terms that can make finding the right authors or the right studies challenging.

I know that there's been a lot of research in the neurophysiological aspects of cognition and it's traditionally dealt with the main/direct line of perception and reaction, attempts to deal with memory, sensation, etc..

What I'm more interested in is what I might call, for the lack of a better term, the steering committee. There seem to be aspects of us internally that aren't attached to our immediate physical condition, they tend to deal more with buffering our more extreme reactions to crisis, or at least I should say this is about the time they become visible - they may be doing more in the background all the time but it's difficult to say.

A couple examples of what I mean: A person has had one of their core values accosted by another person in such a degrading manner that they start acting out in a self-destructive, even physically self-destructive manner. During, and even after, they may feel a heavy parental sorrow washing over them as if something that loves them deeply and dearly is grieved or saddened by their actions. Similarly if a person is on the edge of suicide and really planning to go through with it they may very quickly feel something laughing, nudging their shoulder, trying to play, but the overall idea is that the more serious they get in that moment about taking their life the more emphatically that 'other' set comes after them and tries to nudge them into lightening up and if that strategy is starting to look as though it's not working the person will usually have equally intense waves of nostalgia over every little thing, every friendship, all kinds of good things from their childhood, etc. etc..

It would be interesting to know whether these are just other pathways of the brain, perhaps self-stimulating, because they're not in direct use at the time or because their extreme opposite is in so much activity that they're excited into activity as well. It's as if when a person takes an extreme view or an extreme direction of will they can practically split in two momentarily and everything that's opposite to what they're feeling can be encountered a bit like a secondary entity.


It's a fascinating effect but I'd love to know if anything's been said at all about this from the scientific standpoint.

What I like about science done right is that it goes a long ways to combat what I consider brain-mysticism, ie. I'm fine with mysticism-proper as a management program for subjective balancing but mysticism on points of fact and sweeping dogmatism over human knowledge gaps really bothers me. Factual mysticism about the brain can lead to either a) It's all external spirits or b) It's all the brain hallucinating, and I think either or - about a lot of things along these lines - puts a lot of very important topics in these sorts of black boxes or no-go zones where the intellectual sloppines in both the idealist and physicalist directions is almost unbearable and has a way of stopping any reasoned or intelligent conversation about the matters at hand. Really if the effect I just described is even neurobiological balancing that wouldn't make it any less profound, it would just mean that we'll want to check in with ourselves much more in times of stress than we'd want to check in with the outside world because the later will usually provide the least adaptive advice.

The original post just boils down to a question that could be asked in one sentence.

you're asking "is there a little man sitting at a steering wheel for your brain?".

The answer that it's a fallacy to think of it that way because if there were a single little man sitting at the steering wheel of your brain then that little man would need another even tinier little man sitting at the steering wheel of his brain, and that even tinier little man would need a still tinier little man in his cranial cockpit, and so on...

couldn't find any, but what's the question exactly?

the steering committee still operates from Plato's Cave


often, playing around with the 'interpretations' can be more fun

ex (by) the hive mind, 'we' expect that to be a 'over-mind' with each being an agent-cell, but it's refocus-able into taking control of the factions within oneself, that makes more sense and is more likely to steer away from throwing oneself into an outside superbrain
as in
be your own hivemind (first)

Leary's 8 Circuit model of the mind hasn't gotten the attention that it deserves because of his notoriety, in my opinion. It's based on the Chakra System, which has been researched. Given the correspondence with nerve ganglia in the body, and what we know about processing quick reactions and reflexes, we can test some of his claims now. Essentially, he talks about a set of formative experiences which have limited plasticity and set the tone, the prior assumption if you will, for all our other experiences of that kind. It starts with safety/danger, then gets more sophisticated with pleasure/discomfort, and so on as a person ages and has new kinds of experiences of the world. It should be noted that people don't activate them all, and some stop at 2.

The trouble with talking chakra is it muddies the waters even more.

Out of all the hundreds if not thousands of chakra systems across Asia we primarily brought back the one with seven because it agreed at least somewhat with our alchemical metals. I've seen some systems now with eight or nine but I'm really getting convinced, not just me but a lot of experts I've read on the topic, that they have nothing to do with nerve plexi and if anything they're engineered fabrications somewhere in brain itself cultivated through discipline.

IMHO they're fine if you want a basic model for how to set up the psychosomatic basis for thought-hacking your own brain but I don't think they tell us much of anything about 'energy', let alone what kundalini, prana, chi, etc. are.

That's why I like Leary's conception for a starting point, rather than the Chakra system.

Sometimes, I let the "wolfie" part of me dominate.....

But never...and I mean never....am I even close to being a sheep!

As far as the OP I wrote if no one knows and if there's no literature on it then that's fine. I didn't necessarily write this for any other reason than that there are a lot of people who are reasonably well-read here and I figured I might stand a chance of hearing about something someone had read that I wasn't already aware of.

Could you, perhaps, be referring to something along the lines of, betrayal or trauma induced dissociation?

Dissociation is a possibility that the situation almost hints at, just that to encounter something that seems to have a coherent identity is a bit of a trip as well.

Some of what I'm chewing on here also deals with the Holy Guardian Angel concept, or the types of encounters that John of the Cross wrote about in his poems.

I remember an interview with a particular magician who goes by the pseudonym Frater Ashen Chassan and he talked about doing a five day fast - I don't know if it was in line with the Abremelin operation or what not but the overall idea was that he fasted of food and sleep for five days at a campground in the woods and meditated. Toward the end he was starting to get irritable, worry that he could be in danger of being overtaken by large predators if he went too much longer, he had a set time limit of how long he would allow himself and he was getting close to the end of that. It did ultimately happen on day five.

There are people in systems of training who will do various things to get this effect, usually not quite as austere as not eating or sleeping for five days but they'll do something of intensity for several months. Once they establish that rapport with whatever this agency is inside of themselves they never fully lose that rapport - sometimes the dialog stays for good, other times it might wax and wane.


I take a lot of interest in this because if I understand it correctly this is part of a process of people manually hacking their own minds the way they'd hack a computer. Seems like when someone is able to draw down the components of what people would usually consider madness but do so from a sane and disciplined state they're able to weave it into something else.

I find the end results though equally interesting whether it's all neurological or neurological plus. Either way I do get curious as to what processes get engaged - ie. dissociation, establishing communication with other brains in the body, etc..