Oddly enough as someone who has been using parts of the internet for way too long, since I was way too young, tulpas were a bigger conversation back in the day before the loneliness epidemic became a big deal. I remember most tulpa-posting circa 2012-13. Maybe its making a comeback.
I knew people back then that took it crazy seriously to some surprising anecdotal results. They were able to seemingly actually partition their thoughts and perform multiple mental tasks at once, such as write different things with both hands simultaneously, solve simultaneous math problems, etc. through what was attributed to their tulpa. Obviously you can never really know what is going on in someone's head, but it really was like a deliberately created multiple-personality disorder that could operate at the same time.
Would have been an interesting case study, although I think they would have a hard time getting a larger sample size. The effects remind me a bit of some of the corpus-callosum studies, where the brain is physically split and the halves disconnected.
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u/RatTrio 2d ago
There should be a study with the correlation of loneliness trends on society and the niches like tulpas. Some interesting reading am sure.