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Paul Grobstein's picture

Tourette's and the bipartite brain

Very rich set of thoughts .... and story. Yes, indeed, the bipartite brain notion encourages one to think more about both the story teller and tacit knowledge, and the interactions between them.

Sounds like your seatmate has "Tourette's Syndrome," (see Tourette Syndrome Assocation), a very interesting/instructive example of the interaction between the tacit and the story teller . There's a wonderful description of a surgeon who has Tourette's in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars. The surgeon feels overwhelming urges to act/speak (coming from the unconscious) that he can sometimes (with difficulty) can control (using the story teller) and other times not. Significantly, the urges occur in some contexts and not in others (eg, when doing surgery).

What makes Tourette's particularly intriguing is its contrast with other situations in which people exhibit uncontrollable movements but do not experience any related internal urges. The latter is rather simply understandable as outputs generated by the unconscious, with no story teller involvement. Clearly, there is a story teller invovlement in the case of Tourette's, since the urges are part of conscous experience. There is not a "problem" isolated to either the unconscious or the story teller, but rather something going on that involves the interaction between them.

Yep, "just something we have"? Or, maybe, something we have that we can work with, make something new from, because of the interactions?

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