Joe Rogan | Crazy Facts About Multiple Personality Disorder w/Christopher Ryan

Very, not only individually, but I think we become different creatures in different conditions. Sure. So people sometimes will ask me, like, what is human nature? What's your opinion based on these books? And I say it's like asking, what's the natural state of H2O? Right? Is it boiling? Is it ice? Exactly. What's the pressure? What's the altitude? Yeah. Don't you feel like you're different people with different people as well? Yeah. Yeah. I had a girlfriend, a Spanish, she was, her mother was French, her father's Catalan. She was raised in Spain and then lived in Miami when she was 13 to 15 or something. So she spoke English really well, Spanish, French, and Catalan, perfectly. Right? And we were living in San Francisco and I was high, I was smoking a joint. She was across the room talking to her mom on the phone in French. And then her mom put her dad on the phone. So she switched to Catalan. And I was just high enough that I noticed like, wow, that's not Peggy talking two different languages. And then three, because she would like put her hand on the phone and say, my mom said, no, no, no. So English, French, Catalan. It's not Peggy speaking three languages. Those are three different Peggy's. She's different. Her facial ticks and her movements and her body changed depending on the language she was speaking. Right? And at the time I was in grad school and I thought this is like multiple personality disorder. So I started researching multiple personality. And I sort of came up with this idea that language in her case, because she learned them all when she was very young, reconfigures the brain in such a way that she actually has different identities in those languages. And next time we were fucking, I started talking to her in Spanish and she freaked out. She got mad at you? Yeah, she like, I was a stranger suddenly. Whoa. Yeah. I just said like, you're beautiful or something. She's like, ah, get away. It's like, wow. It's like, get away from me, you creep. Because our whole relationship had been in English. Yeah. Yeah. It was strange. So anyway, so I looked into multiple personality disorder. The story has everything. And I don't know if you've checked that out. You remember Stanley Krippner, my buddy who came down to the podcast with you? He had done a bunch of research on that. And there was a movie called Sybil. Yeah, I remember that. He was the consultant for that movie. He was also a consultant for Rosemary's Baby. Remember that? The Possession. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. That's a Polanski movie. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. One of the early ones. Yeah. People have, with multiple personality disorder, the research is bizarre. It seems to indicate that people have different physiological states in the different personalities. So you could have a different baseline heart rate, blood pressure, these sort of... Yeah, a baseline heart rate. Yeah. In the different... Even it's now this is... I don't know how reliable this is, but I even read that some people have different ocular pressure so that one personality needs reading glasses and another doesn't. What? Yeah. Oh my God. How much is psychosomatic? Like really? How much of who you are and how your body works is dependent upon the way your brain is catching things. Right. Culture, language, personal experience. I mean, it's all your mood, how much you slept the night before, all these things tie into... Identity is something we take for granted, but if you start to look at it, it's like gravity. Gravity, we sort of included in our calculations, but nobody has any idea what's happening. Right. How does that work? Like, oh, two things are attracted. The other guy's got real touchy about it. Oh really? Yeah, yeah, when I brought it up, I think he's... We had a weird conversation and I think part of the weird conversation was the first conversation that he's had publicly since he's been accused of... Right. But he came back from that. ...sexual misconduct. Yeah. Well, he was... They found him innocent according to whatever internal investigation they had when they were doing his television show, or the planetarium, but it's still, even if he's proven innocent, you've got the weight of who knows how many people that think you're a creep now. Right. And he's carrying that around because he was always thought of as being this jovial, really sweet, nice guy. So he's a little tense anyway. That's why I start out admitting I'm a creep. It's good. So that's what you do. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a fucking creep. You can't take it from there. You cannot shame Charlie Sheen. Exactly. But we had this conversation about gravity and it was weird. It was like I was arguing with him, but I wasn't arguing. It was like, it was like, what is causing it? Like, what causes it? And he's like, we know. Like he went into this whole thing. We know what it is. We know how to measure it. That's good enough for me. Yeah. It was a very tense conversation. That's interesting. Yeah. Because it is a faith-based thing there. Like he's right. They know how to measure it. But we also know how to measure placebo. Right. And we don't know how the fuck that works. We know that hypnosis, people can have open heart surgery under hypnosis or have limbs amputated or all sorts of amazing things with no anesthesia whatsoever. Has that really been done? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Have you ever been hypnotized? Yeah. But I don't have high hypnotic ability. That differs. It's another thing that differs among people. And Stanley actually has a really interesting theory along those lines, which is that in prehistoric populations, hypnotic ability would be adaptive because a lot of the healing rituals were keying into placebo response. So if we have a certain ritual, if you're susceptible to, you know, you believe in that, like voodoo, there's a, you know, voodoo death. People die when their spell is cast or a curse because they believe it. If you don't believe it, it doesn't happen. So it happens the opposite direction as well with healing. So his idea is that that would have been a very adaptive characteristic in prehistoric societies, whereas in contemporary societies, it's maladaptive because you're more susceptible to advertising or you're easier to manipulate. Yeah. So I, yeah, I've, when I was in grad school, I had some professors who worked with hypnosis and I studied it a bit along the same, around the same time I was looking at multiple personality disorder, because I was real interested in this question of how the brain and the body interact, how much of, you know, there's all this research showing that people with the same condition in hospitals, exactly the same age, same prognosis and all that, they heal significantly faster if their hospital window looks out on trees as opposed to looks out at another building. Something like that. Just looking at something like nature keys the body into some sort of energy that helps it to heal. Completely makes sense. I've met people with multiple personalities. Well, Roseanne, Roseanne's got, doesn't she make sure that's true? I know another one that's a weird one is the football player, Herschel Walker. I think he had trauma induced multiple personality disorders. Wow. Does she? There's an article that says like, Bill, Bill Murray reminds us she does and then Roseanne says she doesn't. So yeah, I think. And then she does one says seven, having seven personalities is tough. Her saying it. So yeah. Well, here's the thing about Roseanne. I mean, I'm saying this for the 10th time, I guess. She was hit by a car when she was 15 and she was put in a mental institute for nine months afterwards. She had severe brain damage and she lost her ability to do mathematics and like really scrambled her brain. And that is probably the birth of the Roseanne that we know, the comedian. And that's also the case with Sam Kinison. Sam Kinison was also like a pretty normal kid. And then he was hit by a car and pretty severe brain damage as well. And brain damage for, especially apparently, it especially has an impact on your ability to be rational and impulsive behavior. Like people with brain damage a lot of times get very impulsive. It's a bit very so widely. It's what happens to you dependent upon like what kind of trauma, where the trauma is, what part of your brain. But when they said it about Herschel Walker, I was always confused. I wonder if it was from football, like football trauma or was it personal trauma, like abuse? Yeah. People diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, if I remember correctly, almost always were severely abused as kids. In fact, the rationale is that they develop the alternate personalities as a way of escaping a reality that's intolerable. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, people do weird things with horrible memories. They bury them to the point where they don't even really have access to them anymore. Sexual abuse and some traumatic events when you're young. But the fucking human brain, then the way it adapts and molds to things is so bizarre. Yeah. There's an anecdote that is in this book, Civilized to Death. Notice that segue. Ooh, good segue to the book. Pull that bitch over here. Yeah. By the way, the art is done by a guy who listens to my podcast. It's really- Oh, it looks like the art by a guy who listens to your podcast. Cheeseburger. A chimp wearing a cheeseburger with a nice suit on. Yeah. He's got an iPhone. Oh yeah, the story. So there's a species of grasshopper in North Africa that, you know, they hang out, they're grasshoppers, they're dispersed, they eat grass, they chill, right? Rains come, the grasslands expand, grasshopper population increases, then the rain stop, the grasslands contract to the point where the density of the grasshoppers triggers a dormant gene. So there's an epigenetic event in these grasshoppers, and they start to transform, and not over generations, individuals. Front legs get shorter, back legs get longer, thorax changes, shape of the head changes, coloring changes, and behavior changes from being these chilled out, solitary, relaxed grasshoppers. They start attacking each other, they become cannibalistic, and they swarm. Locust. Locust, exactly. They become locust. So this species of grasshopper and locust is the same species. It's the same DNA. It's just responding to different conditions. So, you know, we're talking about the brain, and you know, who you are, and what identity is, and all that. And this, I was reminded of this when you said, you know, people are so different, and the H2O thing. We're not only different as individuals in the same context, we change completely given the context we're in. So the focus of this book is the hunter-gatherers were essentially a different sort of animal. They were essentially, you know, the parallels with the grasshoppers, and now we're swarming. Now we're a different kind of animal, even though our DNA is the same. Well, that completely makes sense. I mean, people that live in small towns are so different than people that live in cities. It's so rare that you find someone who has a small town sensibility in Manhattan. Gotta get chewed up. Yeah. Literally. Yeah, literally.