Common human behavior is a lot more schizophrenic than any of us are comfortable with understanding. I recommend the book "Hare Brain Tortoise Mind" to everyone who will listen. It explains one form of multi-mindedness that leads to you getting your best insights while in the shower --what it's good at and what it's not.
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" is another classic.
Hare vs tortoise thinking is basically why I built Pony [0] an email service that sends and receives once a day. I find that time is critical for cognition, processing, basic reflection. Without the passing of time for me it’s really difficult to communicate at anything but the most basic level. Pony has let me tap into my tortoise brain for corresponding with people.
Another interesting read is “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes, which outlines hypothesis of bicameralism [1].
Did you not look at any of the criticisms included on the wikipedia page? "Debunked" may have been overly strong, but it certainly lacks evidence and there are some good arguments against it.
I'd say "debunked" is putting it mildly. "Vacuous nonsense fuelled entirely by cherry picking and special pleading" is the phrase I'd use. See for example his response to the Epic of Gilgamesh.
schizophrenia in japan is called integration disorder. meaning the many different parts of the mind, or many minds, are not integrating into a single mind.
Reminds me of something from a really great piece about schizophrenia that I read:
> In 2007, they announced a startling discovery. Stevens was trying to identify the proteins that recognized and eliminated neuronal synapses during visual development. “The strangest finding was that a protein that usually tags and removes pieces of dead cells, bacterial remnants, or cellular debris was also being reworked to tag and remove the synapses,” she said. Mice designed to lack tagging proteins—called complement proteins—had problems both in clearing cellular debris and in tagging and pruning their synapses.
> The Stevens and Barres study, published in the journal Cell in 2007, documented one of the most arresting instances of repurposing in biology: a protein designed to ticket germs and junk for destruction had been co-opted by the nervous system to ticket synapses for destruction. “It reinforces an old intuition,” my psychiatrist friend Hans, in Boston, told me. “The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying.”
I've not read Thinking Fast and Slow. But, I'm convinced Malcolm Gladwell read Hare Brain, replaced most of the research stories with funny anecdotes and sold 1000x as many copies of Blink.
I think that Wikipedia article is about a different idea than the parent video.
The parent video is about the idea that an "individual" human mind can be described as being composed of subordinate minds. In this case, left-side vs. right-side.
The Wikipedia article is about the idea that there's no single metric by which we can judge human intelligence. This is, it's theoretically impossible to have any score, like IQ, that cleanly qualifies how smart people are relative to one another.
I think that's wishful thinking, actually. We like to believe there's a singular being in charge that we can label 'self', but I don't buy it. It seems to me that our minds operate more like a society or, at a higher abstraction, a committee, and it only seems like there's a singular entity in charge because the rationalization portion of our brain does its thing after decisions are made, making it seem as though there were a singular will determining our behavior.
I'll check out those titles, but put simply, are you referring to how I talk to myself in many voices in the shower, having a narrative about a problem I'm picking away at?
TLDR of HBTM is that there is a nonverbal, background thread of consciousness in your mind. It has the advantage of a larger working set (short term memory) compared to the verbal, foreground thread. Therefore it can more easily integrate more complicated observations over time than your foreground thought process.
It has the disadvantage that it is non-verbal and does not work quickly, on command or under pressure. You need to give it time to work and you need a quiet, non-focused environment for it to bubble up it's conclusions. Basically, you need to study as much as you can, then go for quiet walks where you relax and don't think about the problem.
It also has the disadvantage that, because your foreground process did not do the work to understand the problem (it just got a cliff notes answer), if the problem changes, your foreground process won't be in a good position to re-integrate the knowledge it didn't work through in order to deal with the changed problem.
Rich Hickey’s talk on “Hammock driven development” talks about this too and the idea of HDD is to load the information into your mind and then... wait. Relax. Allow your subconscious mind to process it and make connections between things. Then, after an amount of time (how long and how many times you repeat this depending on the complexity of the thing and whether you feel like you have some insight yet or not) you consciously think about it again. Hence “hammock driven development”: think about your problem to load it in, then chill in a hammock for a bit.
There's a related phenomenon that I've experienced. Some of my best insights into problems have come to me when I was either very tired, drowsy, or slightly ill - like running a mild temperature. I wonder whether this is because the condition knocks out the foreground process, while not being drastic enough to knock you out fully.
Sounds a lot like the gods in "Origin of Consciousness". Occurs as well, that for those that have seen the MBTI and Jungian stuff, that the introvert/extrovert duality they posit could be described as a tortoise/talker-affinity.
The act of explaining a problem verbally to someone else forces you to be explicit about details that you gloss over when you think about the problem internally. The fun part is that you don't actually need a real person to explain to. Just going through the motions and explaining out loud to no one (or to a toy) is nearly as effective.
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" is another classic.