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I am like this and my husband is like this. We're both academics. I call it 'work mode' and try to make sure one of us is always not in work mode when we're watching the kids.
My best friend in graduate school was a pure mathematician and this was very pronounced for her. She would study for 4-5 hours and then discover she couldn't talk, her voice just didn't work. I noticed her voice was about an octave lower. I think her vocal cords relaxed and she wasn't very good at moving her puppet.
I know exactly what you mean about controlling yourself at one remove. I think I have extreme cases of this, related to intense mental work but usually occurring not while working but during a sleep cycle that night. I wake up to discover reality has entirely unraveled for me, and I need to to do some work to 'jump back in the puppet'. In graduate school, a combination of working intensely and not socializing for bouts of time (I love socializing, but I was busy studying) caused something like a mental breakdown. The psychologist diagnosed 'multiple personality disorder' but I think he had no idea. The psychiatrist had the right idea: he told me to take a break from abstract thought and eat carbs before going to bed to regulate serotonin levels. I went on vacation with my parents and did the carb thing and completely recovered.
Since then, I notice the warning signs and I know I need to spend time with people to reset. However, if I am working on a new problem that seems to require building new neural pathways (this is my sense, perhaps it is an analogy), I will still wake up within a night or two with the feeling of unreality. Often at these times, I am jolted awake with the panicked sense that reality is some kind of conspiracy or fabricated layer, but when I try to pinpoint the details of the conspiracy (aliens? thoughts in the walls?) it dissolves as vague and nonsensical.
This may seem strange (I wouldn't want a prospective employer to read this the day of my interview) but I think I'm very normal -- in the sense of function and ability. I think that there is just a mental cost to high-level thought that we'll have mapped out eventually. For example, autistic traits for many people, and the set of traits I've just described that is something else. (My score on the autism test was 16.4, which doesn't surprise me because I am very social and tend to suffer from too much empathy, where I can't turn off feeling like I'm someone else once I've related to their situation.)
But these experiences I've described of feeling that there are realities nested within realities is captured in popular fiction -- The Last Star Fighter, the Matrix, etc., so I know its part of our collective consciousness. I'm confident it happens to other people even though I haven't found anyone who knows what I'm talking about yet (I even asked at work).
Wow, multiple personality? Your psychologist was clueless. I mean, taking base rates into consideration, that diagnosis is bordering on absurd.
It sounds like you are having dissociative episodes; it could be depersonalization disorder, but it doesn't seem to be causing "significant distress or difficulties", which is one of the DSM IV criteria.
DSM-IV-TR criteria 1. Longstanding or recurring feelings of being detached from one's mental processes or body, as if one is observing them from the outside or in a dream.
Reality testing is unimpaired during depersonalization
Depersonalization causes significant difficulties or distress at work, or social and other important areas of life functioning.
Depersonalization does not only occur while the individual is experiencing another mental disorder, and is not associated with substance use or a medical illness.
The DSM-IV-TR specifically recognizes three possible additional features of depersonalization disorder:
[edit] Etiology
Of the criteria and features you listed, only this one seems apt:
Since you apparently know something about this, what do you think of the hypothesis that dissociative episodes are the result of transiently handing the reins to the revolutionary? I make this connection because it always seem to happen when I'm seeking a paradigm shift in the way I'm thinking about something.
(And yeah, it seemed my psychologist was a nutcase himself. My impression was that he was new and was looking for something really exciting to find and write about.)
You know, that's really interesting. The "revolutionary" mental model would offer a way of explaining all sorts of dissociative phenomena, like dissociative fugue, and dissociative identity. Basically, the brain would be triggering the "revolutionary" to escape from a traumatic reality, not to escape from a false belief. In the case of dissociative fugue, it seems the revolutionary removes your old memory and identity and lets the "apologist" defend your new identity.
It would be interesting to know if dissociative anesthetics can trigger the same kind mind changes as the revolutionary. From what I can tell, it sounds like they can.
(Note: This post is speculation based on memory and introspection and possibly completely mistaken. Any help in clarifying my thinking and gathering evidence on this would be greatly appreciated.)
I suspect that I'm also affected by this and just haven't conciously noticed. Feels like I'm a lot more comfortable with analytical modes than more intuitive/social ones and probably spending more time inducing them than I should.
I'd like to be more aware of my mental modes and find more effective ways of influencing them. Any suggestions?
ETA: Now that I think about it I get a weird feeling. Certain types of concentration seem to act a lot like emotions. The duration seems right, there seems to be a certain mutual exclusivity: strong emotions make it harder to concentrate and intense concentration makes it harder to feel those emotions. Are mental modes emotions?
You might want to take a look at Open Focus-- the premise as I understand it is that if you cultivate the ability to have slow synchronized brain waves, you spontaneously get better at having the appropriate sort of mental focus for what you're doing.
I've worked with it a little, and gotten better body awareness, and probably some psychological gains. It's hard to judge exactly what of the assorted things I'm doing have particular good effects, but Open Focus is scientifically based and working with their attention exercises has some short term good effects for me.
I don't like body awareness. Whenever I start having body awareness, I usually end up noticing various tiny aches and pains that I'd rather not be aware of. (For example, my glasses often cause me pain behind my ears - and getting them adjusted doesn't really help that much.) In fact, trying to pay attention to my body often seems to trigger such pains...
Whereas I've been fascinated for years by improving my body awareness, so take this as possibly risky, but Open Focus talks about making pain less salient (and sometimes go away) by increasing awareness-- partly because pain is increased by trying to fight it so that accepting it helps, and partly by putting it into a larger context of non-painful sensations. I've tried this (on minor pains) and it works some of the time.
This is incredibly interesting to me. Have you found anything else that uses intuition like that? How about music, or physical activities?
Does anagramming, etc. help your concentration? I have to confess I'm not clear why anagramming is any less intuitive and dual n-back more intuitive. When I anagram it feels like letter sequences pop into my head by intuition, while I've only used conscious rehearsal strategies for dual n-backing.