#thinking about thinking

I'm excited to share this page from my new book, THINKING ABOUT THINKING. It will be published next month by Abrams ComicArts.

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https://watermarkbooks.com/list/grant-snider-collection

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✦ Before you continue: This space is for observation, not operation. We are studying the architecture of the mind✦ 

✦ ᛉ ᚨ ᚷ ᛟ ✦

Most people (though some don’t, which is already suspicious) have a mental narrator.

What is that?

The voice some of us hear when we think. An internal dialogue. A kind of commentator nobody asked for but that showed up anyway.

It can be detailed and constant, or more visual and quiet. It organizes thoughts, acts as working memory, might sound like your own voice… or a much more annoying one.

So what does hypnosis do?

In most cases, it tries to silence that mental narrator. The idea is that only silence remains. And the hypnotist’s words.

But sometimes your mental narrator doesn’t cooperate.

— Should you obey? No. I don’t want to. I don’t like you.

— Stop thinking. I want to think. Right now I’m thinking about how I’m listening to you.

— Let go of control. I am in control. Of being in control.

— This is safe. I don’t know. When someone says “this is safe,” it usually isn’t.

And there’s the problem.

It’s not that hypnosis fails. It’s that your mental narrator figured out the trick and decided to troll the process by live-commenting the whole thing.

and while you’re reading this… who’s talking now?

Mushrooms are so intriguing. Plants are so interesting. The ocean is beautiful and enticing. Sometimes I forget how interesting the world we live in is. Sometimes I forget how much better it might have been if it wasn’t marred by the stains humanity constantly paints upon it. That’s a funny thought actually, paint is just another form of stain. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But waste build up is killing our world. Hell, why’s it our world? Just because we’re constantly dominating other species does that mean they don’t also exist upon this planet? We treat our world like trash. We’ve only got one. No amount of searching for another will ever erase the damage or cleanse us of our sins on this planet. Nothing will ever change what we’ve done. Forgiveness is a little like insanity I think. I mean, to an outsider it may seem that way at least. What can’t you forgive? Not even from a moral standpoint, objectively what cannot be forgiven when forgiveness itself is so ??? I think I’ve lost the plot, I’ll stop now.

I made a post about it before but was talking to wife about it again last night. The fact that in the 18th and 19th century the study of dissociation, or auto-hypnotic ability, was this huge broad category of medicine, psychology, physics, and spirituality that branched off and began to specialise. Mesmerism, hysteria, Spiritism, and Psychoanalysis were all knocking on different doors to the same house and in Europe, Freud won with his bullshit fantasy model, but in Brazil, Spiritism really took hold.

To the point where there are Spiritist Hospitals that along with psychiatrists and nurses employ mediums that tell you if your mental health ailment could be due to spirits hanging around from past life trauma and help you to release them. Like the "symptoms are not explained by cultural practices such as mediumship" in the DSM for psychiatric disorders is there in part because mediumship is so prevalent and largely harmless (if not actually beneficial) in Brazilian culture.

Like, if you wanna get all purely scientific then you can explain it as traumatic events getting warped by the autohypnotic brain into something that seems like it happened to someone else in a past life which makes it easier to process in a similar way to how IFS asks you to distance yourself from your parts so that you may be your most helpful self in resolving internal conflict, but I do wonder what the world would have been like if Freud hadn't abandoned dissociation as a model and instead developed it to incorporate the strange way in which traumatic memory can present in some patients.

Would we have have explored the dissociative ability of the healthy mind? Understood how hysteria and the placebo effect really worked? Discovered endogenic plurality as a genuine psychological model? Or even developed more accepted spiritual models of Psychotherapy? I mean like half of my therapists have had spiritual beliefs but it's always discussed in a hushed tone like "oh you're a friend of Glenda Goodwitch too?" We know that culture can have a strong influence on how a mental health condition can present, and I don't think it's very helpful to try and view those presentations through a western lens, they're their own thing, but we can imagine how our own lens might have been different.

I dunno, I guess I just wonder if we're denying some core aspect of human nature when we try to be completely scientific sans spiritual, if we have been wholly rejecting techniques that have worked for centuries or millennia on the basis of being spiritual instead of being curious about their real world practical uses.