Can some explain in depth what tulpamancy looks like cognitively and how it works?

[Officerbaconfarts]

I’ve been looking through studies, papers, and annectodal research trying to understand what exactly a tupla is. I grasp the concept, but not the *how* and *what* of it. Does the creation of a tulpa take certain neural connections and divide them into a separate line of function? Is it the applied lack of inhibitions to a subconciouss stream of thought? Does any one know of nueroimages of the brain while engaging with a tulpa?

[TurboSimmie]

These are all extremely good questions, but I have to admit that I'm out of my depth here. What I can say is the "how" and "what" very wildly from brain to brain as having a tulpa (not to mention BEING a tulpa) is an extremely varied experience depending on the person. 

 

15 minutes ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Does the creation of a tulpa take certain neural connections and divide them into a separate line of function?

 

Kind of? A large part of the purpose of tulpaforcing is to create and/or repurpose certain neural connections, at least in the more "orthadox" understanding of tulpamancy.

 

17 minutes ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Is it the applied lack of inhibitions to a subconciouss stream of thought?

 

Maybe for some? Not for me though...I'm just as inhibited as my host and don't really have a stronger connection to the subconscious than him. Some people have a tulpa that might fit that definition though. In my case, my host says that me thinking feels an awful lot like him thinking. Kind of like a different program running on the same hardware. I feel that there are people out there that experience--or at least expect to experience--a tulpa as a completely seperate and involuntary thing as if being possessed by a different being. But the real experience for most tulpamancers is a lot more mundane. After all, it's happening in your same brain, it's probably not going to feel foreign or unconcious. Phil can still feel my thoughts forming as much as I can feel his. I feel like I haven't quite answered your question here but hopefully this was of some value.

 

23 minutes ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Does any one know of nueroimages of the brain while engaging with a tulpa?

 

Ooh, not that I'm aware of, but that would be really interesting! Sadly since tulpamancy is such a niche and largely unknown thing I doubt there's ever going to be much interest in formal study. But that would be fascinating to see!

[Luminesce]

Well, there's not really an abundance of professional studies on tulpamancy, and I haven't really heard from the single one that said it was going to do neuroimaging (though I haven't looked, I guess)

 

But if you still want my most in-depth explanation of how I think tulpamancy works, you would probably be best off reading a collection of posts my system's made that tend to focus on Switching, as "How tulpamancy works" is often at the core of that, for us.

 

Fair warning that, while we're still not scientists and these posts aren't studies, that this will be a lot of reading (and that the posts were all made standalone by different members of my system at different times over multiple years, so it might not be 100% cohesive)

 

{Edit: This post I just made might sum things up in a lot less reading and with far less focus on Switching than the following reference posts of ours}  

Spoiler

 

6 minutes ago, Luminesce said:

I've said before that our understanding of not just tulpas but of personal identities entirely, is that they're just extremely complex sets of instructions on "How to be someone" your brain follows, composed of countless associations (with memories, preferences, experiences, etc.), habits, general details "about yourself". By default someone thinks as there only being one, and literally everything being under that umbrella of "them", though practicing tulpamancy can shed some light on how naive that is. In my case, I realized this before finding tulpamancy, while reading a lot of western-buddhism philosophy and similar content. What you think of as "You" is just a (very big) box of associations and beliefs that your brain uses as instructions to run the conscious part of the mind.

 

Tulpas, then, are the exact same thing as "You" - smaller boxes, that will grow over time as they gain interactions, experiences, preferences, etc. until they're more or less equivalent in complexity to the host (though most tulpas will only get to this point via switching or possessing to interact with the world, as it takes immense imagination and time to gain the same experience purely in-mind). Not that a tulpa needs to be as complex as the host to really be another separate person in the brain or anything, I think a tulpa becomes tulpa-like fairly early on in the development process and once apparently-autonomous they will just grow naturally from there.

 

So they're just another extremely complex set of instructions for your brain on "How to be someone", just like "You" are. Part of mapping out this model of identities involves realizing just how much that goes on in your brain and body is not related to "You" at all, though. While you or whoever is fronting may exert conscious control over countless aspects of the mind... Most of the time, you're not. And the box of instructions will only have so much unconscious influence (though there should be plenty of unconsciously-acted differences between any two well-developed systemmates), with countless aspects of your body and brain still working more or less on their own.

 

I'm not going to call that "BodyOS", I just call it "the rest of the brain", because I think naming it is giving the impression that it's not immensely bigger than you and your tulpas' identities. But it gets the point across.

 

Also, holding this model of how identities work as how you really work makes switching a lot easier, lol. Thinking like this before even finding Tulpa.info is probably why we were able to learn switching very easily just by hearing that it was possible once we got here. Not to mention I'm 100% convinced this is actually how brains work, with countless other sub-identities (often called "masks", like "the mask you put on at work/at school/etc.")

 

 

Oh, and I forgot to mention a huge aspect of tulpamancy is that you learn how to have two (or more) of these "identities" active/run by the brain at the same time. That's just its own individual skill to develop, and then this model's "boxes" are plugged in from there.

---

 

My post on "How Plurality Works"

https://community.tulpa.info/topic/13997-evidence-for-plurality-plus/#comment-198058

 

Our "Very Important Post" on what we refer to as "Meta-tulpamancy" and switching (Our own meaning of "Meta-", meaning above or outside of, not metaphysical)

https://community.tulpa.info/topic/15076-the-relationship-between-possession-and-switching/?do=findComment&comment=248654

 

Edited June 2, 2022 by Luminesce

[Ranger]

1 hour ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Does the creation of a tulpa take certain neural connections and divide them into a separate line of function? Is it the applied lack of inhibitions to a subconciouss stream of thought?

 

There is not enough scientific research done on tulpamancy to determine an answer or really even a scientific hypothesis for these questions. I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims they know how tulpas work in the brain.

 

1 hour ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Does any one know of nueroimages of the brain while engaging with a tulpa?

 

Yeah, Kronkleberry and Alyson posted their brain here. 

 

Other than that, the only other legitimate scans are held by the Stanford study scientists.

 

1 hour ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

Is it the applied lack of inhibitions to a subconciouss stream of thought?

 

I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying, but going off of what Simmie said I have a similar experience. When I think, it feels like we share the same hardware even though I feel like I'm a different software. There are people who claim to have a different experience, but I am personally skeptical of these claims.

 

1 hour ago, Officerbaconfarts said:

I’ve been looking through studies, papers, and annectodal research trying to understand what exactly a tupla is. I grasp the concept, but not the *how* and *what* of it.

 

I'm not a neurologist or a psychologist, but I can give my community understanding of what a tulpa is.

 

A tulpa is created when you convince yourself a piece of your mind is not you but someone else. The objective of tulpamancy is to change your definition of who you are to accomodate the possibility of another person living alongside you in the mind. For example, you can create a form, talk to it, and associate all of the responses as their responses, not your responses. These can be impulsive in nature (I think some struggle with assuming tulpas can only communicate through impulsive thought) or detailed complex thoughts, like talking about an idea for a work project. As a result, lots of different things could be being associated with the tulpa.

 

I can't tell you what is happening on a neuroscience level, but I bet that the actual "tulpa" from one system can vary wildly from the "tulpa" of another.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Ranger

[Zen 禅]

It should be firmly understood that as the others have said, there simply isn't enough real scientific data concerning this, and you're asking for neuroscience when what we have about tulpamancy is early psychology based on experiential anecdotes. We're still living in the Freud and Jung stage, as it were, not the MRI and neuropsychology stage. None of us can give you a concrete answer.

However, that being said, the behaviours in question are possibly best described as dissociation applied in a particular expression to the higher mental functions of the brain which are broadly located in the frontal lobe. Dissociation in this context is a function not of a particular area of the brain, but a function of the brain communicating with itself on the whole (though the brain does have a communication centre which facilitates this): The brain is continually deciding whether or not to pass data from one area to another and the complete picture of what it chooses to pass forward or not makes up the area we call the conscious space, or whatever the brain is focusing on consciously at the time. Dissociation itself is such a large can of worms that describing it in depth is probably grounds for a medical specialization.

 

I would broadly not expect the neural images to be particularly different from thinking of any random character in your head, except for the influence of dissociation.

You then ask about subconscious streams of thought, and I would warn you about thinking in those terms. You say it like it's a scientific concept, but it isn't. In neuroscience the correct term would be unconscious, and for good reason: The unconscious doesn't conceive or think at all, it isn't a person inside you and it can't form a personality, only reflex. Personality is a higher function of the brain emerging from a combination of memory and abstraction about the self, which in turn emerges largely from how we develop our decision-making abilities. I would say that many tend to use impulsive thought like that as a method of learning to loosen their perception of control, but that alone doesn't generate a tulpa, make. Actually building a pattern of who they are and how they behave is how you make a tulpa, just like with your own identity.

They are not unconscious at all, they are thoughts that are entirely equivalent to your own except they feel as if they are someone else. Consider this: You do not fail to understand which thoughts are "yours" and which thoughts are "characters" in your head when you visualize a scene or something to that effect, do you? There is a fundamental and perpetual understanding of who or what is thinking in the brain at all times. Tulpamancy is in part the manipulation of that understanding, and creating a separate "identity-tag", only you accept it is real and so your brain doesn't dissociate from its emotions heavily like it does with a random character from a book or movie.