It's the pseudo-academic part that puts me off; reeking as it does of patchouli and overpriced small-press books. :}

I've been made aware of this before; it's a very old spiritual practice, after all - but it's non-trivial and way beyond my level of interest. I really don't encourage people to hack their own wetware just because it's cool, and I doubt it's encouraged in responsible spiritual traditions, either.

Still, there are other things that point to this as being within the range of normal cognitive function. Dissociation is certainly a well-recognized phenomenon, in both traumatic and what we consider "functional" contexts, such as in an emergency room. The third man factor is recognized, if not well-studied. Authors report having arguments with main characters and losing all the time.

Then of course there is the classical Multiple Personality - which is usually thought of as the product of Traumatic Dissociation. I could go on and on about that, but I won't, at least not at the moment. Suffice it to say that there is good reason to think that the ability to "hive off" a functional personality is pretty common and may well be part of ordinary brain function. FMRI studies confirm that it's a real thing in some sense. That is to say, if there is a disorder involved, it's more along the line of having the case removed from your computer and thinking that it's somehow a different thing than it was before. Nope. Same thing. Same tired power supply, same motherboard with a few tired capacitors. And that's why it's not working well.

Oh, I'm sure the tumblr types are annoying. It used to be on Livejournal. But annoying things can still be real. I mean, purely for illustrative purposes - Rush Limbaugh.