If I could find the time, I’d engage in scientific research to confirm my conviction that Multiple Personality Disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder) develops one’s brain far beyond what it would normally have been.

Of course, no sane person would want anyone to suffer the trauma that causes Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and until healing commences, D.I.D. is more of a handicap than an advantage, but I believe that ultimately a person can enjoy intellectual advantages from having had multiple personalities.

Athletes focus on developing their bodies to perform at a level far beyond what they would otherwise achieve. Genetic factors aside, most people vary in their speed, strength, stamina and health, not so much because of deliberate training but primarily because of circumstances, such as the type of job they end up in. Just as the performance our bodies can achieve varies according to deliberate or accidental training or circumstances, so it is with our brains. In fact, no part of our bodies is capable of being improved by training or circumstances more than the brain. In psychology, learning has been defined as creating a permanent change in the brain.

To understand how having multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder) could end up an intellectual advantage, consider this analogy:

Imagine a laborer daily working in a job that involves moderately heavy lifting. His fellow workers use both arms for the task but he is forced to use only one. Since the load is not shared between each arm, each time he lifts, his lifting arm is effectively bearing twice the weight than borne by the arms of his fellow workers. The muscles in that one arm would therefore end up not only developing more than those in his other arm but stronger than the arm of any of his fellow workers. Now suppose that although he was allowed only to use one arm each time he lifted he was permitted to sometimes use his left arm and sometimes his right. Each arm would grow unusually strong because each time he lifts, one arm must bear the full weight, but in this scenario he will end up with superior strength in not just one arm but both. While he is unable to use both arms together, however, he has little advantage over his fellow workers and often a disadvantage, since using only one arm is awkward. But suppose after a year or so of lifting this way he is allowed to use both arms. He would then be able to lift heavier loads and achieve more than those who had always used both arms.

This is how I believe it is, intellectually, with people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.). For years they have had to perform mental tasks, one alter at a time, thus being forced to use only a portion of their full intellectual capacity at any given time. This puts them at a significant disadvantage to other people. Like lifting with one arm, each part of the brain controlled by a specific alter is forced to develop beyond the corresponding part of the average person’s brain. If, after years of this, the person begins to heal from Multiple Personality Disorder (M.P.D.) so that alters begin to work together – thus allowing the person to access different parts of the brain simultaneously – one would expect the person to then have greater intellectual power than if he or she had never had multiple personalities (MPD), just like the laborer who finally gets to use both arms.

One reason for believing that having multiple personalities affects the very structure of the brain is the very age at which Dissociative Identity Disorder (D. I. D.) commences. When neuro-scientists speak of the plasticity of the brain, they mean the ability of the brain to undergo change, move functions from one part of the brain to another, adapt to brain injury, and so on. Research confirms that although older brains have more plasticity than was once thought, the brain’s plasticity is greatest in babies and thereafter slowly declines through the years. (Just one outworking of this is the well-known fact that the younger a person is, the easier it is to learn a new language.) People with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D I D) usually have their first alter at a time when they were little children or babies – at a time when their brains were particularly capable of significant “re-wiring” and anatomical changes.

Psychologists keen to understand how the brain works and what it is capable of, have paid much attention to studying people who are bilingual. An observation they consider significant is instances in which bilingual people have suffered an injury to the brain that causes them to lose an entire language and yet their ability to use the other language has remained in tact.

I think findings concerning bilingual people are relevant to people with Multiple Personality Disorder (M P D) because it seems likely that having multiple personalities would cause various skills, abilities and knowledge to be duplicated and stored in separate parts of the brain, similar to what apparently happens when learning a second language. One alter, for example, was formed in her twenties without the ability to read and write. She had to teach herself these skills all over again. If this was the genuine learning from scratch that it seems, then this woman has the ability to read and write stored in two separate parts of her brain. If so, then extrapolating from the findings concerning bilingual people, it is a good guess that if she were to suffer a brain tumor, head injury or stroke, her chances of one of the parts of her brain storing this ability being unaffected would be higher than would otherwise be the case.

A friend of mine, when in her twenties, nearly died from an infection that caused a dangerously high body temperature to rage for several consecutive days. Thereafter, her short-term memory was significantly impaired. Years later, as she began to understand Dissociative Identity Disorder, she discovered young alters that were exceptionally good not only at remembering events from years ago but with recalling numbers and so on encountered just minutes ago. By gaining the help of these alters, her ability to perform tasks that required short-term memory skyrocketed.

This same woman had a poor sense of smell but discovered younger alters who had a much better sense of smell. She found that a younger alter could smell something and transfer to the host exactly what it smelt like.

I presume that in both cases the parts of the brain habitually accessed by the host had been slightly impaired, whereas those parts accessed by the younger alters still functioned well.

Creativity is of immense importance not just in the arts but in scientific advance, inventions and problem solving in every imaginable field of endeavor. It is well established that children are usually more creative than adults. The experience of people with Multiple Personality Disorder (M. P. D.) suggests that through their child alters, are much more able to tap into their creativity than if they had not suffered this disorder.

My observations of people with multiple personalities also suggest that they are unusually skilled at multi-tasking. A young alter wrote in an e-mail apologizing for the spelling, explaining that her host was busy and unable to help her. My curiosity raised, I asked what her host had been doing. She replied that while she had been e-mailing, another alter was on the phone to a second person and yet another alter was working on figures and Instant Messaging the figures to a third person. At the same time she was handling interruptions from a fourth person who was with her in person. Her only restriction was that she had just one set of hands. She had the phone on her shoulder, and kept alternating between typing a little of the email while mentally working in the Instant Messaging, and then swapping to typing the Instant Messaging while mentally working on the e-mail. People who have seen this woman at work have been flabbergasted, but I expect that many others with multiple personalities could do equally amazing multi-tasking.

I see Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) as like splitting a computer into several smaller computers and then having to maximize the efficiency and programming of each computer in an attempt to match the performance of people who have larger computers. I see healing from Dissociative Identity Disorder (D I D) as linking each computer so that a super computer is formed. This is not merely restoring the brain to what it would have been had fracturing not occurred, but taking the brain beyond that level because the fracturing had forced each part of the brain to develop more than that part of the brain would have done had there been no fracturing. This is why I believe that having multiple personalities (M. P. D.) can end up producing a brain that is superior to what it would otherwise have been.

If you have any thoughts about the possible intellectual advantages of Multiple Personality Disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder) I would love to hear from you.

Related Pages

The following is just a sample of the help available. For a full list, see Christian Resources: Index of Help for Dissociative Identity Disorder

Main Page:
Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) Powerful Help for People Traumatized as Children

Pages by Alters:
An Alter Meets Jesus Insights into How to Help Alters

Insider’s Testimony: “I Thought I Was the Opposite Sex!” Coping With All the Confusion of Being an Alter

God’s Love for Alters A Word from Jesus to an Alter, For all Alters

Helping you explain the gospel and empower child alters:
Presenting Christ to Child Alters Heartwarming Stories for Child Alters

Free help in the full recovery of survivors (male and female) of all forms of sexual interference:
Comfort, Understanding and Healing for Abuse Survivors

God’s Extreme Patience With Alters:
“I Kept Trying to Force God to Reject Me” Encouraging testimony of a man with D.I.D (alters not specifically mentioned, but feature strongly)

General Help:
How to Comfort the Hurting

Personalized support

Grantley Morris: healing@net-burst.net