The CBC reports:
One of the most notorious drunk drivers in the Ottawa area has been found not criminally responsible on his latest impaired driving charges because of a mental disorder that makes him believe female celebrities are controlling his actions.
The 33-year-old [Matt Brownlee] told psychiatrists that he knew the legal repercussions of his actions, but believed singer Shania Twain was helping him drive.
To my mind, the most salient question is: why focus on Shania Twain? The fact is, even people in Western cultures commonly believe some external entity is helping them in their accomplishments—ever heard the phrase “God is my co-pilot”? But the article simply states Brownlee’s belief, as though that were sufficient to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for his actions.
There is an attitude on the part of society that anyone with beliefs that strange must have something wrong with them. Strange here means unsanctioned by society—if large numbers of people believe something, then that belief is perfectly fine. I think this is at least partially due to uneven media coverage: a person’s unusual beliefs aren’t typically made public unless that person does something newsworthy, and most newsworthy actions are negative. Many, many people go through their daily lives guided by entities they believe to be external, but it never becomes an issue for the media.
If you believe unusual things, think about how you can challenge society’s prejudices. Do you think it is worth it to be more open about your beliefs in order to make society aware that responsible individuals hold them? It is a common opinion these days that one’s beliefs ought to be personal and private, but at one point sexual preference was also considered personal and private. This view had to be challenged in order for people to start working in any sort of organized fashion to change society’s views.
But at least, if you do believe unusual things and you get into trouble with the law, be conscientious enough not to damage the reputation of others who believe similar things by using your belief as an excuse.
May 22nd, 2006
OK, here’s something cool for everyone who doesn’t identify with what society says they are based on their physical body. At the Technology Entertainment Design 11 conference in 2001, inventor Ray Kurzweil demonstrated a system which captured his body movements and voice and digitally altered them into the body movements and voice of his female alter-ego Ramona, who became (as Kurzweil says) “the first live virtual recording artist”.
Computer technology has been a real boon for people who either don’t identify with their body or wish to explore alternate identities. To quote Kurzweil’s explanation:
We all have personalities within us that are difficult if not impossible to express with our real-world bodies and in real-world environments.
With the current level of generally available technology this sort of activity is restricted to text and static images. Video and audio tend to be viscerally, immediately convincing in a way that text usually isn’t.
February 25th, 2006
This was just too poignant a quote to pass up. Tricia Helfer, the actress who plays Battlestar Galactica’s character Six, commented about her role at September 2005’s Dragon*Con:
“We kind of got Six into a box somehow and we’ve been trying to figure out how to get out of it inside the limitations of an ensemble show,” she said. “When your character is in someone else’s head all you find yourself doing is reacting to what goes on in their head. You don’t really have an arc, or a story, of your own.”
…though it seems that the second season—especially last night’s surprising episode Downloaded—is starting to change that.
February 25th, 2006
Science fiction author Greg Egan’s stories often deal with themes of the nature of consciousness, mind transfers, artificial intelligence, and so forth. He is considered one of the best current hard science fiction writers, and he has won the Hugo Award, one of the two top awards in science fiction.
Egan wrote horror before he wrote science fiction, and it shows. But his stories are far from the usual fare. A typical horror story involving mind transfers or clones or the like might try to scare the reader with lurking clones of the main character, doing strange things out of sight. In The Extra and in many of his other stories, he reverses this convention. The premise is that the higher reasoning centers of a person’s brain are transplanted into another body, but the lower centers retain some consciousness; ordinarily we would see things from the perspective of the higher centers and the horror would come from the not-quite-consciousness of the lower centers in the old body—the horror of ambiguous personhood. But Egan writes from the perspective of the ignored, of the transient, of the minds that exist unacknowledged and powerless—in this case, the lower centers left over from the transplant, and this is far more unsettling than the other way could ever be…
February 1st, 2006
The Hearing Voices Network is a UK-based organization devoted to raising awareness of the experience of hearing voices and supporting those who hear them. They do not support a solely medical approach to the subject; rather, there is an increased focus on the personal significance of the voices to those who hear them. An overview of their guiding philosophy is provided in the Web article Redefining Hearing Voices:
Hearing voices in itself is not a symptom of an illness, but is apparent in 2–3% of the population. One in three becomes a psychiatric patient—but two in three can cope well and are in no need of psychiatric care and no diagnosis can be given because 2/3 are quite healthy and well functioning.
…but I have to wonder how much their views are affected by sampling bias (being more likely to hear about people having problems), because they go on to say the following:
They are messengers and they have a message. They are related to sincere problems that occurred in the person’s life and they tell us about those problems. Therefore it is not wise to kill the messenger.
In any case, they bring up a very good point—that what a person is told regarding the meaning of their experiences has a large effect on how well they deal with them:
In Sandra Escher’s research with children hearing voices she followed 82 children over a period of four years. In that period 64% of the children’s voices disappeared congruently with learning to cope with emotions and becoming less stressed. In children with whom the voices were psychiatrised and made a part of an illness and not given proper attention, voices did not vanish, but became worse; the development of those children was delayed.
This is something we often forget: the power that our essentially arbitrary culture and beliefs have over us, and our own power to change them.
Other Hearing Voices Movement Links:
January 23rd, 2006
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Relative State is devoted to exploring the topic of plural psychology. Ever since man first called himself ‘I’, there have been others…
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