Is there any psychological or physical disorder that causes someone to live entirely in the present, running on instinct only, and causes them to have no perception of either the past or future, like an animal? In that same vein, has there ever been a culture or religion which attempted to eliminate the perceptions of past and future, and return man to a “natural” instinctual state, like our pre-conscious ancestors once lived in the wild?
(Yes, this is for a short story.)
I’m a little confused by that part of your premise in light of the social hierarchies and familial bonds that we’re aware of in many animals, such as chimpanzees, elephants, etc.
If you can do away with the absence of memory part, a sociopath might fit your bill.
Hedonism? Whatever feels good, do it… screw the consequences. Sorta along those lines.
That’s heading for GD like a bat outa hell. However, I think you might find some of the sort of things you’re looking for (for a story) in this search on induced amnesia Stick the word 'tribes 'in there to, and you get a few interesting hits on ethnobotany.
I have Bipolar Type I disorder (manic depression). This past summer I was in my worst manic phase ever and wildly out of control. I took and 11,000 mile roadtrip around the United States on a whim. I had no plans and I literally lived on 100% impulse without any further thought. I would sleep, wake, and eat without any planning. This could happen at 3:00 in the afternoon or 3:00 in the morning. Every single behavior was like that. I would wake up and start driving with no idea where I was going and just wait for inspiration to strike me. It could be 100 miles down the road or 800. I had no idea. Unfortunately, the impulses took a darker side too. I assaulted two men in bars and one at a gas station for being pricks. You know how a stranger can make you mad by words or actions and you feel like clobbering them? I actually acted on those impulses. Luckily for me, I won each time but one of them was fairly badly injured.
I am treated and completely normal now but I can personally attest that acting strickly on instinct/impulse does not fit well in normal society.
Alzheimer’s disease?
Don’t believe his lies.
Part of the problem is that planning for the future and accounting for the past are both psychological consequences of our human perception of reality, and to remove those would be to remove part of what makes us human.
You can find the traits you speak of evident pathologically in certain people however it usually involves brain trauma to the parts of the brain used for these tasks. I remember reading an article in college philosophy class concerning a Russian WWI casualty inflicted with a similar malady. He lost certain abilities thanks to a well-aimed shot to the head and thus lived on “lacking of the common capacity to plan his future actions”, or unable to balance a checkbook or anything else required of a modern person. The unusual fact was that he was completely normal in most regards, he could recognize his mother and name a fruit, however he couldn’t handle organizing himself to do anything that required planning and foresight, indicating that the portion of his brain damaged was responsible for just these specific higher-order human designs.
In short you would be hard-pressed to find examples of people who “solely deal in the present” (outside of the sociopath ward) because we are not wired that way, and to be wired so would usually imply a break from the common concept of a human mind.
If it’s for a short story (and this is only a suggestion), why don’t you just have the character do without explaining it? Is it really necessary to give the character’s behavior a label? Do you want the character’s behavior to be merely foreign to the society around them or to be uncontrollable?
There are certain areas of the brain that when damaged, destroy the “memory loop”, so that nothing can be remembered at all, since it can’t move past short term into long term. I wish I still had my psychology text; I sold it, alas. (Somebody else ought to be able to say more about it, or straighten me out.) I seem to remember learning that individuals who were not able to process information into memory tended to suffer from depression eventually, unless they were institutionalized and even then it was expected. The severity of it depended on what point in their life they lost their ability and how their memories were affected. (On preview, a lot of what Mirage said.)
You might want to look into the fight or flight response as well, to see if that instinctual response to stress could have something to do with your character’s behavior.
For the “animal” part, which I’m guessing you meant in more of a literary sense than a scientific one, a feral child might interest you. Though it would be more ignorance of human behavior than a willful disregard for it. Is that what you’re aiming for?
To add to my earler post, I would say that what you experienced Shignasty was a plan to go everywhere first, as opposed to the “now I’m in the car driving, lalala” that would exist without planning.
There was a guy, called Clive Wearing, here in the UK, who suffered an extreme form of amnesia because a virus destroyed the part of his brain that’s essential for memory. He had no short term memory to speak of, and very little long term memory. Here’s a link from the Observer Magazine which carried the story in January.
“Instinct” is still based on memory: it is those responses which have become so familiar that we do them ‘automatically’. Even though I automatically speak English whenever I open my mouth instinctively, I still had to learn English, to put those responses into memory in the first place.
An interesting disorder which might be characterised as ‘living on instinct’ is environmental dependancy syndrome, where you can’t help reacting to your environment. For example, when showing a person with EDS around your house, they might see the bed and immediately get undressed, climb in and go to sleep.
I think **Bryan Ekers ** is referrring to the movie “Memento”. It’s a fascinating movie about (don’t worry, I won’t spoil the plot) a guy who can’t remember anything that happened longer then 15 minutes ago. He has to keep himself on track (he’s on a mission for revenge) by keeping notes with him, and polaroids of faces of the people he meets.
But the guy isn’t “living on instinct” anymore then anyone else, so he isn’t entirely what the OP is looking for.
You might want to check out some of the neurological case-studies by Oliver Sacks, though. One is an actual description of a guy who, after a head-injury, can smell as well as a dog, so infinitely better then the average human.
He becomes a bit more instinctual, but not much. If anything, he becomes less “abstract”.
Also, Oliver Sacks describes a few cases of people with very severe amnesia, who have lost all short term memory and thus live in a perpetual here and now. A here and now which they try to connect with the last things they DO remember, often events that happened decades ago. For example, Sacks describes a “Jimmy, the lost sailor”. Jimmy has severe Korsakov’s syndrome and still believed he was in his twenties. When Sacks handed him a mirror, Jimmy is shocked to the core to see a fifty-year old face reflected back at him. “It would be an incredible cruel thing to do to him”, said Sacks afterward about the mirror, “but fortunately he had forgotten about the whole thing and his own shock just five minutes later”.
Wasn’t there a case where some guy had a rod shot through his head and it took out some higher order brain functions? (Late 1800’s or early 1900’s?)
Bwana Bob, that would be the famous case of Phineas Cage.
After the accident and his miraculous discovery, his personality had changed profoundly:
So, more instinctual? In a way, yes. I’ve read some articles that say this form of a tendency for irresponsible, impulsive behavior is linked to an inability to imagine the emotional consequences of actions; the person can’t imagine the full weight of the shame, or regret, if his actions will turn out wrong; therefore he takes too great risks.
There was an article in Time recently which reported that ‘snap impulse’ decisions are sometimes the better decision instead of a ‘rational choice’ decision. Think of how many people say ‘trust your instincts’. In situations you could go by your own past outcomes or those of others, or you could base you decision on something that is not logically planned out and which is a quick decision. I am still thinking about how man would behave without any concepton of the past or the future.
In fact, there is a philosophy I think stemming from phenomenology that is used in practice in sports. I had a professor in this subject who apart from teach at the University of Stockholm, coached downhill athletes for among others the olympics. The idea was to become the skiing, by banning out all thought and relying wholly on automated behavior, living completely and without thought in the now. However, automated behavior is of course not really instinct - that would be innate behavior.
Of course, there are also the bacchanals. There is this famous book, Secret History, that dwells on this. You might find that inspiring. I liked the first 100 pages but then the rest was dreadful and boring. Other people I know however liked it a lot.
The main problem is that we cannot really go back from being who we are to that state - our brain will have too much automated behavior, we have many parts of our brain that remember, and its hard to shut exactly only the memory parts off.
Perhaps the best and most interesting research is that of children who have not been raised. In linguistics I came across a few of those, as they teach you much about what can be learned at a certain age, if people develop languages even if they’re not taught any and so on. There’s very little data, but such children are the most unspoilt instinctual humans you can find.
Still, if you research human biology, particularly fysiology, you’ll probably be able to predict what it would be like. Research on Chimps, seeing how similar they are to us, could indeed also be useful. Perhaps there is data out there on what problems orphaned Chimps have making it into a group, that would tell you what they normally would have learnt from their parents.
Memento was a great movie, by the way. His memory was very short, just short term memory, his long term memory was broken. I think he could hold on to something no longer than 2 minutes. He wrote things on his body too. There was a great plot twist in that movie that, if you catch on to it (if at all), will give you one of those rare epiphanic moments.
Just to get ther interested started with Google 
About the bachchanals: Georges Battaille is a philosopher who wrote about “the annihilation of *the rational individual * in a violent, transcendental act of communion”.
Check out this link on Feral Children, such as the Wild Boy of Aveyron and Genie.
Just to get the interested started with Google:
About the bachchanals: Georges Battaille is a philosopher who wrote about “the annihilation of *the rational individual * in a violent, transcendental act of communion”.
Check out this link on Feral Children, such as the Wild Boy of Aveyron and Genie.
The character claims at one point (to the mysterious telephone caller he spends a large part of the movie talking to) that he moves around on instinct, so it’s not totally off the mark.
I’m not sure the reference had to explained to this crowd, though.