Mode & Behavior 5: The Autobiographical Self

This is, I suppose, the last in my series of posts about behavioral mode (I’ve listed the others at the end of this post). In this post I take up the problem of autobiographical continuity: if our memories are neurochemically ‘keyed’ to emotions, desires, and moods, then how can we possibly construct a coherent account of our lives? Won’t any attempt to remember, to reconstruct, the past be biased by our current mood?

I argue that play-acting and story-telling are the keys to this problem. Through those imaginative activities we create a psycho-cultural space in which it is possible to assemble a coherent autobiography. I am thus arguing the art provides the prototypes through which we recollect our lives.

Note: This post is based on two earlier pieces, a post at The Valve, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, and a long article originally published in PsyArt, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (abstract and link to PDF). The PsyArt article contains documentation that I’ve omitted from this post.

Autobiography and Dissociated Identity Disorder

In two recent books Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens) has articulated a theory of the neural self. 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 study (The 3 Faces of Eve) Eve had three personalities; 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.

And that, of course, brings us back to behavioral mode (as laid out in the second post). I thus note that Damasio himself has argued that the RF and closely associated structures play a critical role in "managing body states and representing current body states. Those activities are not incidental to the brain stem's well-established activation role: they may be the reason why such an activation role has been maintained evolutionarily and why it is primarily operated from that region" (Feeling, 274). That is consistent with Warren McCulloch’s model.

My suggestion about DID, then, is that the mechanism that switches between one identity and another is fundamentally neurochemical. Each identity favors a particular mode, or, more likely, a set of modes. 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.

Note that this explanation of DID not only tells us how the brain switches from one identity to another—RF control over cortical arousal—but also suggests that the various neural selves do not have to be in physically separate tissue. They can exist within the same volume of neural tissue. They are differentiated by chemical sensitivity, not by physical location.

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?

I would like to move toward a solution to the problem of autobiographical continuity by counterpointing DID against the perfectly normal activity of play acting. 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 ones 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 were 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?

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility

Let us consider the first stories that we hear. We hear them when we are young, very young. They are generally quite simple, and they are told to us by our parents in a setting that is comfortable and safe. We hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. We are allowed to experience a wide range of emotions, just a little, in a context where we are safe.

That, I suggest, is the behavioral core at the center of our capacity to construct a coherent autobiographical account of ourselves. Listening to stories, and, in time, telling our stories, creates a psychobiological ‘space’ in which one can access stories of all kinds of events, actions, and feelings. It is but a step from recounting the actions of fictitious creatures to using those accounts a templates on which to model accounts of one’s own life.

Patrick Colm Hogan has provided a bit of evidence on this. In The Mind and Its Stories (2003, p. 67) he tells about a two-year-old boy’s use of the Peter Rabbit story:

Kurt . . . hears the Peter Rabbit story and becomes fascinated with it. He listens to the story repeatedly. He then retells the story, such that “real-life events that Kurt had experienced . . . in the company of his mother and grandmother . . . are attributed to Peter Rabbit and his mother.” The fact that Kurt integrates his own memories into his retellings of the story – his explicit “personalization” of these stories . . . suggests that memories played a part in his enthusiastic response to the story initially.

Yes. But also, I suggest, the story gives him a way of accessing and organizing his own memories. The life is being constructed on models provided by art.

And not only children, but teens and adults as well. As we grow older the wider community takes the role that the parents serve for the very young. They provide a sense of security and acceptance. In oral cultures, stories are experienced among friends and familiars. One hears the grunts and murmurs of approval of our fellows, the common laughter, but also the communal sighs of dismay; these mingle together and establish the story itself as a good and necessary pleasure. In literate cultures we may read stories in private, but we discuss them among our friends, or in school. Theatrical performance, movies and television are frequently experienced in the company of others. In one way or another, literary experience is institutionalized as shared communal experience.

My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.

Thus we do not have to be sexually aroused to recall occasions of sexual arousal, nor do we have to be have to be angry or grieving to recall occasions of great anger or the darkest grief. The stories we have learned in the company of others have created a “level playing field” in the mind, neutral ground from which we can survey the full range of human experience. If we are able to step back from the living of life to recall and examine our feelings and actions, that is because our experiences with stories have created a rich weave of mental prototypes through which we can recall and interrogate even the most densely emotional of our experiences.

Conversely, if we cannot do this, then how can we construct a coherent view of ourselves? 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? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation.

The repertoire of stories a culture affords its members is thus critical. If a culture would deny its members stories about, say, violence or sexuality, then how can those individuals integrate their own sexual and violent feelings and actions into their selves? How can they think about those things in a coherent way?

* * * * *

This view is different in emphasis from the common notion that stories are useful because they allow us to gather and share information. My argument is not about the usefulness of the information enfolded in stories, but about how the social situation of story telling facilitates our ability to recall incidents of a kind captured in stories. The usefulness of that information is of little or no account if we cannot access that information except from within very specific states of mind. Story-telling creates a mental arena in which we can review and become self-consciously aware of the full range of our feelings and behaviors, where we can see them in relation to one another.

Sonnet 129 Revisited

Let us return to where we began this series, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. It depicts a person—any person, you, me, the man in the moon, the maid in the mist, anyone—trapped in a cycle of desire and guilty recrimination. And it concludes:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Yes, we are, each one of us, helpless. But we are also, each one of us, in this together. In its concluding couplet the sonnet evokes that psychological space of security and acceptance in which we tell tall tales so that we may apprehend the ordinary tales of our lives.

The whole poem, of course, is itself articulated within that imaginative space. By expressing this dilemma with such power and compactness, does the poem itself extend the range of that imaginative space? Over the long haul, is that what literary history is about, extending the range and richness of the stories we are able to tell about ourselves?

Earlier posts in this series

• Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129
• Mode & Behavior 2: McCulloch’s Model
• Mode & Behavior 3: Music, Language, and Beyond
• Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology