Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  A memetic complex (i.e., a mix of memes) is determined by averaging the shades of the memes that compose it and not according to the shades of single memes. The zealous supporters of the Soviet empire might illustrate that.

  USSR—the red empire—following the 1917 revolution, claimed to lead humanity to the end of history. Its founders assumed that Marxist-Leninist philosophy was the ultimate answer to all that was wrong in human societies. The equality meme that enchanted with its clear shades (and, literally, on the moral level, it does have a high moral value) was mixed with numerous turbid memes that turned its shade into turbid red from the blood of the “victims of the system.”

  Naive people who not infrequently believed they had good intentions became “color-blind” servants of the complex of memes dictated by the commissars of the communist USSR and turned, according to Lenin, into “useful idiots.” The ones who served the regime caused great suffering to numerous people in the name of a “noble ideal.”

  A gloomy but evident conclusion is that those who choose to focus on a single meme out of a conceptual structure that is a mix of memes, and at the same time sweepingly adapt the multimemes’ inclusive concept without criticizing the rest of the components, voluntarily choose “color blindness,” and their discretion is highly questionable.

  Real-Estate Battles of the Inner Skull

  The generator of memes, the workshop in which new memes are formed, is mostly based on old models that undergo change and adaptation to other memes that reside within the same brain. There is co-evolution among the memes as well. Sometimes a certain meme reinforces another meme and, at other times, it weakens it. The main structural meaning of reinforcing or weakening the meme’s grip on our brain is increasing or decreasing, respectively, the number of synapses devoted to the encoding of a specific meme. The memes are territorial creatures that compete over living area within the limited space inside the skull.

  The Meme of the Self

  The experience of the brain user creates the term “self” as a super-meme.

  Some claim that the “self,” which is by definition an autonomous entity that exists on a sequence of time, from past to present, is a delusional meme that has a conceptual bond with many other memes in a pattern of comprehensive conceptual cluster (memeplex).

  Means of Transferring Memes and Infecting with Memes

  Once the mythological order “Beam me up Scotty” is given in the science fiction series Star Trek, the physical body immediately shifts its position to a new destination in space by means of teleportation. The body of the time traveler is scanned, turns into information, and is recreated, according to this information, at a different site in space. We might say, metaphorically, that teleportation of memes is, in fact, what memetic evolution does. The information travels from one brain to another without any physical transfer of the objects that carry it.

  Our brain is designed to process information and spread it in a narrative pattern. Despite the suspicious attitude “hard-science” people sometime have toward “soft-sciences” (such as humanities) people, due to the narrative pattern combined in their studies, there is no doubt that their role is highly important with respect to promoting culture, since they are like “agents” who spread memes of great importance in the conceptual war of all against all that takes place in the battlefields of human brains.

  Senior memes tend to embrace memes that are close to them “in spirit” and reject the ones that are conceptually remote in a pattern that might be called “meme brings meme,” as in “friend brings friend.” Due to the array of memes networked in our brain, which creates a bias to adapt memes that will reinforce their predecessors’ grip and support them, it seems our brain tends to act as a lawyer who selects evidence according to its compatibility with his clients’ arguments more than as an objective judge in pursuit of the truth.

  It seems that memes that find an anchor point to the memes that exist in our brain (i.e., patterns that reinforce or share similarities with the patterns that already exist in our brain) bring about intellectual pleasure, which is probably manifested in a certain level of physical pleasure, and results in an increase in dopamine production in the reward cycle.

  On the other hand, memes that contradict other memes that reside in our brain create basic resistance, since they induce a state of concern and insecurity. It partially explains the success of self-help books, which group together ideas intended to improve our life quality. The truths listed in them are, in fact, mostly truths we are all familiar with. Their seeds, as beneficial ideas, exist in our brain, and the echoing of these seeds of memes in our brain, combined with external memes of similar spirit that sprouted into mature ideas and which are presented in such books, reinforce familiar memes and create the same pleasurable echoing in our brain in the sense of the “truth speaks for itself.”

  “Skeuomorphism” is a term that is used, inter alia, for describing the assimilation of an old product’s features in a new product. Combining of familiar features with new ones leads to an encounter that is characterized by psychological calmness, due to the fact that the familiar features, which are reflected as senior “memes,” improve the interface between the new product (and its reflection as a new meme) and the consuming brain areas.

  This marketing insight, which relies on the “familiar within the old,” is applied—for example, in the field of product design, in which senior configurational traits are assimilated in a new product and facilitate the rapid anchoring of the new product to old memes that represent a familiar product and, by that, increase the chance of the new product befriending the customer’s brain. In this spirit, the first cars that were produced were similar in shape to the coaches that preceded them.

  In order for a memetic seed to sprout into a mature insight, it would be very supportive for it to be planted in a sympathetic, memetic bedding that will constitute a growth platform.

  A “natural meme” is a meme that seems to have connected to a brain structure that fits it conveniently, as if it were made for it. Such a meme is highly infectious and has a great chance of surviving.

  Memetic Gerontocracy

  The older memes are deeply rooted in our brain, since their seniority grants them a special status. It is most difficult for memes that do not match the old memes and do not interface with them to set foot in our brain. In this context, we can relate to the wonderful story “Nightfall,” written by Isaac Asimov. The story illustrates the impact of a highly exceptional event on the brain of people who are not ready for it in the conceptual (memetic) sense. The conceptual core change enforced by the event leads to complete chaos.[39] When the most basic memes of our reality perception are challenged, we enter a state of mental chaos.

  Memes and Technology

  Technology changes the conceptual contents of memes and the way we infect and are infected by them, as well as the way we perceive and process them. The navigation maps created by technology enable us to navigate in the oceans of information that rage around us and to find the shortest route between our brain and the desired information.

  In the era that preceded television and the Internet, bookstores were the ones that sold ideas to which one could be exposed in a selective pattern.

  In the age of the Internet, our species can be referred to as “Homo interneticus.” The brain-Internet interface is a type of a new phase in human evolution.

  The utopians might say that the availability of information, which increases under the auspices of technology, enables us to experience an enriched reality. The ones who disagree might say that the attack on our senses uncontrollably gulps our brain’s processing resources. It seems that, in light of the information flooding nowadays, we must be more selective, in relation to the memes to which we expose our brain, in order to protect its resources. The Internet became an infectious vector of memes, and it constitutes a founder phase in the evolution of human memes.

  Thus, for example, it is possible to conceptualize in it the globa
l human mix of emotions, as in a pixilated color balloon. It can be done with software that scans tens of thousands of blogs from around the world, seeks words that describe emotions, and afterward translates them into colorful dots according to a predefined color-emotion key. The resulting color mix reflects, at any given moment, the temporary state of mind that is common in the blogosphere, and some might see it as the reflection of the global, human state of mind—as a summation that reflects an emotional super consciousness.

  Memes at the Right Time—in the Splint of the Era

  The “right time” is fateful timing for the memes. A meme (in the shape of an idea) that is too foreign, in terms of the conceptual world of the people who live in a specific era (i.e., a meme that does not find an anchorage point in the memes that reside in people’s brain,) is likely to be rejected and considered to be faulty or imaginary.

  In the satirical novella by Edwin Abbott from the nineteenth century, Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, the two-dimensional square from Flatland is exposed to different dimensions and different geometry from those it was used to within the boundaries of its flat world. It visits a land with a single dimension—Lineland—and a land of no dimensions—Pointland—where the monarch who rules it lacks dimensions, with regard to consciousness as well, and believes that he is surrounded only by creatures of his own imagination, in a sort of thinking pattern that resembles solipsism. On the other hand, the square is also exposed to the third dimension, where he is thrown to the depths of Spaceland under the patronage of a ball. The cross-dimensional journeys engulf his conceptual world, reshuffle his system of concepts and recalibrate his beliefs. The mindset change he undergoes leads him to share his insights with his subjects in Flatland, but the priests consider him a heretic who jeopardizes the serenity of Flatland’s citizens and deprive him of his freedom. That is how the wandering square is materialistically, though not spiritually, confined to a land with only two dimensions.[40]

  The Roman emperor Hadrian said, “Being right too early is just as bad as being wrong.”

  A genius idea that is ahead of its time will have difficulty becoming an infectious meme that will conquer the brains of the people. It does not drain into the common drainage basins that are wired in the brains of the people who are exposed to it. In other words, there are “deviational” patterns of knowledge our brain refuses to assimilate, regardless of their correctness.

  In this context, we might say that one should communicate with people of different ages in accordance with the level of their brain maturity—i.e., in accordance with the repertoire of knowledge patterns (memes’ representations) stored in their brain. For example, when we talk to children, we should use “their own language” and pour into their brain ideas that will be able to drain into the basins that exist in their brain. It is also true for adolescents, or when we talk to adults or elderly people, taking into consideration their fields of knowledge and the topographic map of their various skills. No one knows everything about everything.

  Our brain is unable to assimilate every piece of knowledge, but it has the ability to assimilate pieces of knowledge whose way was paved by previous memes and that contain a certain level of similarity, which allows for an anchoring point to a representation of a specific meme that is already stored in the brain.

  “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come” (Victor Hugo). History is rich with examples of stubborn geniuses, such as Copernicus, Galileo, and others, who were outcast in their time and whose insights were not acknowledged appropriately. Nevertheless, with time, these geniuses made the world see things as they saw them in the first place in their minds’ eye.

  The Terms of Conceptualization in the Mirror of the Era

  In each era, humans dig with a metaphorical spade that conceptualizes concepts in terms of the systems that the people of the era are familiar with.

  We conceptualize complex ideas by creating analogies to a system of complex concepts we are familiar with and which serve as a sort of a prototype of complex systems in our time.

  Each era has its own “model system,” which is often a system that represents the technological forefront of that era, in relation to which analogies are created. Thus, for example, the ancient Greeks saw musical scales and geometric structures as a model for understanding the laws of physics. In Europe, during the Age of Enlightenment, the clock served as a conceptualization of reality. During the industrial revolution, the universe was compared to a steam machine that produces entropy. Even today, we cannot avoid the cultural bias that is part of human conceptualization. We tend to explain the dynamics of the operation of complex systems, such as the human brain, through analogy to the digital computer.

  The patterns—the memes we are familiar with—serve as an anchor point for conceptualizing ideas (memes) that we were not familiar with before they became familiar patterns.

  A Trendy Meme

  Trendy memes sometimes do not pass the test of time, and their enchantment expires as time goes by.

  An example of that is the meme of the “science” of phrenology. Phrenology blossomed during the first half of the nineteenth century, mostly in Europe. The theory of phrenology divides the surface of the skull into thirty-five areas, each of which represents the person’s skills in a certain field. According to the topography of the skull, which is deduced from a thorough palpation of the skull, the skills of a person are deduced. Phrenology is an example of a trendy meme that had infected numerous brains and was admired mostly in the lounges of European aristocrats, but, due to its lack of factual basis, its spell broke, and the term “neophrenology” has become synonymous with pseudo-science, which is based on false beliefs that lack factual basis.

  Illusory, trendy memes are often characterized by a simplistic guiding principle, which supposedly stores hidden wisdom that is known only to the most expert ones and is spread out in an efficient distribution pattern that is inexpensive and available to numerous brains—the “secret of the world on a T-shirt.”

  “Memetic Libido”

  The desire to match the thoughts that were produced in our brain with thoughts produced in other brains, to “communicate” and talk, can be defined as the “libido of the brain.”

  Some might claim that, unlike the libido in its usual sense—the sexual libido—which seemed to be more intense among men, women’s “memetic libido” is stronger compared to men’s. Women tend to discuss memes, especially the ones who have a significant emotional component, with other women more commonly than men do with other men (or women).

  Brainstorming is, in a sense, an “orgy of memes”; thoughts deriving from different brains “mate” with each other and create new thinking offspring, whose components sprouted in the wombs of different brains. Some of these multibrain thinking creatures are assimilated in our brain and guide our behavior. In this sense, the psychologist Lev Vygotsky was right when he said “Through others we become ourselves.”

  Emotion as a Memetic Duplication Agent

  Sometimes, when we are exposed to the visible behavioral motivations of others and to their feelings, we might become infected with them as a sort of memetic infecting of emotions.

  Ideas that are particularly powerful often accumulate their power through the lower lane, due to their proximity to strong feelings. These ideas might someday be understood as reflecting mirror neurons in action.

  Memes that sprout on an emotional bedding of a trust relationship grow stronger roots, and, at the other end, their top is taller. Positive feelings for the person who infected us with the meme will probably intensify the echoing of this meme in our brain; thus the importance of establishing a therapeutic alliance between therapist and patient. Trust relationship has a crucial effect on the “conceptual infecting” and on the ability of “therapeutic memes” to become a living insight.

  The Memes as the Basis of Human Culture

  The Memes in the Mirror of Evolution

  We are the offspring of the
Hominidae, who were victors with respect to genetics, and our brain is full of memes that are the offspring of the successful memes of the past.

  Culture grants us the right to drink from the pool of human experience.

  From the dawn of the appearance of the Homo sapiens on the surface of Earth, brains similar to ours have experienced a world that is similar to ours in many senses. Out of their insights and their memes, we often enjoy shortcuts when we march in the tracks that were paved by our ancestors.

  The memes are like sticks in the intergenerational relay race. In this race, there are phases of life during which our hands are stretched out to get, as in childhood, and, alternately, in which we are willing to give, such as during the second part of our life.

  During the Renaissance, it was said that “a person moves forward by looking back.” In a sense, we can interpret it as a conditioning of the progress in the future by relying on insights that were acquired in the past (senior memes in the cultural or personal sense).

  Thus, for example, regarding a cliché. A cliché is allegedly a worn-out meme that was overly used and that is mostly transferred intergenerationally, but it mostly relies on true foundations. Its banality derives from the fact that it is perceived as obvious, not from its being untrue, and, most of the time, it constitutes a meme that, in numerous brains, is considered a truth that contains concentrated wisdom—a fruit of the experience of multiple generations.