PPP, Part 11.2, The Interpreter Module, Hijacked

Greetings, Friendlies,

The thing about the Interpreter Module, it’s only as good as its inputs. As Gazzaniga says in Who’s In Charge, the interpreter can be hijacked.

Remember back from PPP 4, Cool Avijjā Examples, the patients who did not recognize themselves in a mirror (Mirrored-Self Mis-identification)? The proposal here is that there is some module of the mind which recognizes the me, myself, I-ness of reflections. When that module is damaged, this sense of me/myself/I-ness, we might call it an “affective resonance” of some kind, this resonance is not transmitted to the interpreter module. And so the interpreter never gets a queue that it is seeing “self”. If not self, it must be someone else.

And there was the case of the subject who thought her own hand was not her hand, that it was somehow her son’s hand (Somatoparaphrenia). In these subjects it seems that the somatosensory system, the part of the brain that monitors the body’s existence in space, is damaged. It is not sending information about the hand to the interpreter. From Gazzaniga: “When a neurologist holds the patient’s left hand up to her face, no somatosensory information reaches the patient’s interpreter and she gives a reasonable response: “That’s not my hand.” The interpreter, which is intact and working, is not receiving a report from the parietal lobe about a left hand, therefore it cannot be hers.”

There are lots of other named delusional conditions, Capgras Syndrome, Reduplicative Paramnesia, Cotard’s Syndrome, Fregoli Syndrome, and probably lots of yet-to-be-named conditions. For these individuals, their subjective experience has been “hijacked” to an egregious degree.

But what about the rest of us? What about avijjā? What about our tendency to build narratives with always limited and sometimes faulty information? Might it be that most of us are actually being “hijacked” most of the time?

Your thoughts most welcome. :)