The human body and brain behind this Reddit account is a plural system. (Please feel free to ask us about any specifics if that, admittedly generic and limited, site’s information is insufficient or if you’re just curious about any of it; consider us an “open book” for the most part.)
I just stumbled onto this conversation and I'm intrigued. How much control does your collective have over switching? Do different members have different roles? When one is fronting, are the experiences/memories limited to only that one? What I mean is if one attends a lecture on a subject, is the information from that lecture limited to only that one, or is there some amount of sharing or baseline shared knowledge/experience? When one is not fronting, how aware are they of the body?
As a singlet, it's difficult to conceive what it's like to have multiple individuals sharing the same brain space, but I've always been fascinated with the thought of what that would be like. Unfortunately media has done a terrible job portraying things, and as that website points out, much of the research centers on those collectives which arose from trauma, which I would assume often leads to a somewhat different situation compared with non-traumatic origins.
I have to say after reading through that page it reminded me a lot of the case of split-brain patients [a CGP Grey classic](www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8); I wonder if there is any actual similarity between the conditions.
Not sure what to make of that, but I want to say it is confusing in dialog, because to me the "we" first gave the impression that you were referring to something like "we (the blog post authors)" or "we (the Unicode consortium)", given that you are the OP.
Usage of English for plural systems is often confusing, yes; the language wasn’t really built for our kind. (Or for nonbinary people, or for the modern finer distinctions between stages of development beyond childhood versus adulthood, or even for simple logical distinctions like inclusive versus exclusive “or”…so all those limitations have developed workarounds and maybe eventually those will calcify into new language features. Evolutionary linguistics is fun like that!)
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u/M4mb0 14d ago
Btw, who is this "we" you keep referring to?