One thing that's very important to our entire world view is the idea that every person/system/being is the foremost expert on their own subjective internal experiences. To break down what that means, let's take it a word at a time. Subjective means something that could be interpreted differently by different people with no solid, empirical interpretation. Internal is within. That one is fairly straightforward. But combine that with experiences and you have the things one experiences internally, such as within your own mind. And that whole thing is something one experiences in your own mind that is not quantifiable in solid, empirical terms.
In this case, that thing is plurality. We are starting to have some empirical data emerging. We know how chronic early life trauma impacts brain structure, we've been able to see how possessive actions by created headmates lights up different neural pathways, we do have those fact based things. But there is a lot more to unpack. And a lot of it simply isn't quantifiable. How each system experiences their own plurality is going to be different. It just is. No two systems are exactly the same. No two systems are going to have the exact same experiences.
We come at this from our own educational background, which is in cultural anthropology. This is why we're so devoted to the idea that every person is the foremost expert on their own experiences. There's a lot of discussion in that and related fields about informants (people from a culture being studied who act as primary sources for research) are the actual experts on their own culture. The anthropologist studying the culture is merely translating the informant's record of their experiences into something more easily interpreted by outsiders and applying academic theorems to it.
We feel the same is true of plurals/systems/multiples/collectives/whatever anymany wants to refer to themselves as. We (humanity in general) genuinely do not know how the human brain works. We have some vague ideas, sure, but the amount we know is absolutely dwarfed by the amount we don't. And the only way we're going to learn anything about something as impermanent as thoughts and the cataloging of memory is by listening to people. And then we can devise research around that. But your brain is not a tape recorder saving every thought you've ever had.
Most of this stuff is extraordinarily fleeting. And as such progress on understanding the brain won't get anywhere if we ignore people's experiences. You want research? Listen well enough to ask the correct questions. That's more than half the battle in our field, learning how to find the right questions to ask. Just because the research hasn't yet been done, just because you can't physically put something under a microscope or an MRI machine, does not mean there isn't anything to learn. It means the right questions haven't been asked yet. Ask those questions. Then we'll talk.
