The narcissist was conditioned-from an early age of abuse and trauma-to expect the unexpected. Thus, the narcissist’s nearest and dearest-his sources of secondary narcissistic supply-serve as “external memories” and as “flux regulators” whose function it is to maintain a regular, stable flow of affirming and cohering data. The narcissist needs this constant input to maintain a sense of continuity. PAPERįeedback from other people regulates the narcissist’s sense of identity, self-worth, boundaries, even his reality test (his correct awareness of the world around him). The narcissist and psychopath do not remember their previous tales because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions that are integral parts of real memories. Tomorrow's confabulation often negates yesterday's. This is why narcissists and psychopaths often contradict themselves. These tenuous concocted fillers are subject to frequent revision as the narcissist's inner world and external circumstances evolve. But the narcissist fervently believes in their reality: He may not actually remember what had happened-but surely it could not have happened any other way! To outsiders, these fictional stopgaps appear as lies. In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists and psychopaths confabulate: They invent plausible "plug ins" and scenarios of how things might, could, or should have plausibly occurred. They get rid of any information that challenges their grandiose self-perception and the narrative they had constructed to explicate, excuse and legitimize their antisocial, self-centred and exploitative behaviors, choices and idiosyncrasies. Narcissists never experience reality directly but through a distorting lens darkly. During these, we are effectively blind because the brain doesn’t process the information that comes in when they happen.Narcissists and psychopaths dissociate (erase memories) a lot (are amnesiac) because their contact with the world and with others is via a fictitious construct: The false self. Our eyes aren’t all-seeing, but capture fleeting glimpses of the outside world between rapid movements called saccades. In fact, most of what you “see” is an illusion. “A lot of what our senses are doing is something like data compression: simplifying, in order to be able to function,” says Mazviita Chirimuuta at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Did you notice the last time you blinked, or that fleshy protuberance called your nose that is always in your peripheral vision? No, because your brain edits them out. If our senses took in every detail, we would be overwhelmed. On top of this, our brain presents us with only a snapshot. “Everybody knows that we don’t see all of reality. Humans, unlike bees, don’t normally see ultraviolet light we can’t sense Earth’s magnetic field, unlike turtles, worms and wolves are deaf to high and low pitch noises that other animals can hear and have a relatively weak sense of smell. In some senses, it is obvious that subjective experience isn’t the whole story. Some researchers even contend that the live-stream movie in my head bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality. So it is rather unsettling to discover this might all be a fabrication. Inside my head is a vivid depiction of the world around me, replete with sounds, smells, colour and objects. I don’t know about you, but I feel that I have a perfectly good perception of reality. Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Can we perceive reality?
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