NP article of possible interest

[Doug Millison]

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2002/green01.htm

Disruptions of Identity: Points of intersection between Blake's Urizen
Books and Cognitive Science

abstract:

One of the primary features of the prototypical self is the ability to produce
and identify with a reasonably complete personal narrative. The findings of
cognitive science, and particularly research into Dissociative Identity
Disorder, challenge the claims to universality of this prototype. While
cognitive science presents memory as the often unstable product of multiple
sub-systems, DID raises the possibility of the presence of multiple
biographies,
and even multiple selves, within the same brain. Similar possibilities are
explored, both verbally and visually, in Blake's Book of Urizen, which
challenges dominant Lockean models of the self. Reading Blake alongside recent
research into memory and identity yields insight into the continued
influence of
eighteenth-century ideas about identity, explores the wider moral dimensions of
such psychological models and suggests alternate ways of interpreting a variety
of psychological phenomena.