Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

Some find a teleological pattern of development in the development of human cultures, and a view called historicism suggests that the events that take place throughout history are developed with relation to a certain guiding principle, a sort of a supermeme that directs their course.

  Culture on the Couch

  Freud coined conceptual terms (memes) for describing the main structures of the soul, such as the id, which is at the core of the soul and which is the creator of raw urges. On top of it, there is the ego, which is in charge of awareness and is rational; its role is to moderate and refine the id and channel its primitive urges to channels that are socially accepted.

  Freud saw the evolution of human culture as a collective reflection of the constant tug of war between the id and the ego. A society is more advanced when the individuals in it are willing to sacrifice the desires created by their personal id on behalf of the public welfare.[41] The memes that describe the soul, according to Freud, became super-memes, but their glow faded down the road.

  The Wisdom of Generations

  The wisdom of our ancient mothers, who were most successful, in terms of survival, is wired into the brains of women, and, similarly, the wisdom of our most successful ancient fathers is wired into the brain of men.

  Some might claim that the amygdala is, in a sense, the prehistoric man, who still lives within us. In this spirit, the frontal lobes are the “load” the culture puts on the shoulders of the prehistoric brain.

  Memes and Science

  Science, being created by human beings, is not unbiased. The memes that reside in the brains of scientists determine the starting point of studying a certain phenomenon—which research questions will be asked, and which interpretation of the findings will be selected.

  Subjectivity is inherent to science as well. Research methods are a derivative of a scientific worldview.

  The way to objective memes (“the facts of the world”) relies, at its basis, on subjective memes (“scientific worldview”).

  It seems that objective knowledge, of any kind, ultimately relies on a collection of subjective knowledge, and some claim that the term “objective knowledge” is an oxymoron in itself.

  Scientists hold memetic axioms in light of which they operate. Thus, for example, the English scientist Isaac Newton, and other scientists of his time, worked according to the supposition that a creator—God—enforced a cosmic order on nature, and their role was to discover this order.

  Science that seeks the alternative skies, which are not inhibited by angels and demons, is a reflection of a subjective meme of scientists who do not believe in common theological explanations that guide thinking.

  Modern science tends to look for causality rather than purposefulness in nature. Its explanations are mostly causal rather than teleological.

  The Secret of Foresight

  The sentence “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” is ascribed to Isaac Newton, who is responsible for revolutionary scientific insights.

  Newton was poetically commemorated in the words of the poet Alexander Pope: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night, God said: Let Newton be! And all was light.”

  Newton merged his glowing insights with those of other brains and, as part of the dialectics of science development, improved them with the signature of his unique brain.

  The crystallographic data regarding the structure of DNA, shown in Rosalind Franklin’s studies, served as crucial information at the basis of the revolutionary insight of Francis Crick and James Watson regarding the DNA structure. There is no doubt that observing the horizon of the language of genetics from the top of the double helix was made possible also by standing on Franklin’s shoulders—i.e., by relying on her insights.[42]

  The saying “Great minds think alike” is sometimes referred to jokingly when two people (e.g., you and your friend) think the same thought at the same time. It can be seen as support to the argument that the similarity among our brains (and among humans in general) is greater than the difference. On the basis of a similar cultural climate, complex insights might sprout in different brains simultaneously. A famous historical example of that are the insights of differential calculus that were raised simultaneously by Isaac Newton and the German philosopher-mathematician Wilhelm Leibniz. Another example is the natural selection hypothesis that appeared at the same time in the brain of Charles Darwin and the brain of (the less-famous) Alfred Wallace.

  It seems that there are universal memes that represent what can be referred to as “substantial insights” related to the nature of the world, whose secrets will be revealed by various inquisitive brains. These brains rely on a similar memetic load that enables them to cross the threshold to understanding the revolutionary meme formed in their brain, by means of interaction between the memetic load stored in their brain and the world of phenomena.

  According to a similar view called “cultural determinism,” the spirit of the time, with regard to the cultural climate, and the insights available to the brains of people who live in that era are the wheels of the coach of progress rather than the genius of individual ones. According to this view, a pioneering insight resembles a discovery of a new continent that awaits the random discoverer; the wind of circumstances brought his ship to its shores, and if he fails the mission another discoverer will arrive and win the experience of the discovery.

  There is probably an “essential and sufficient” memetic mountain, and the person who manages to reach its peak and, on the way up, is exposed to the memes that are piled on top of each other and constitute the mountain, has the chance of looking beyond the mountain to the new horizon of the promised land. The one who manages to do that is able to create a revolutionary insight that contains the past insights, which compose the memetic mountain, but soars higher and takes the horizon forward to a great degree.

  Alternately, it seems that the brain owner who infused his brain with a critical mass of memes that were born in many other brains beforehand might start within his brain a chain reaction that results in the glare of the “eureka.”

  Memes that represent the forefront of human knowledge in a specific discipline are born with a built-in expiration date, though it is not a specific date. The hourglass that times their life expectancy rolls over and trickles its grains from the birth of the renewing insight, when the last grain announces the appearance of the newer insight, which is the “new truth.” It can be defined as the “half-life-time of truth” (in this context, we may ask the question, is it possible at all for our mortal brain to produce immortal insights?).

  Prior to the Second World War, Albert Einstein visited Britain and, at an event that was prepared for him, a famous playwright, Bernard Shaw, proposed a toast. He said that Ptolemy’s theory lasted for two thousand years, Newton’s theory lasted for two hundred years, and he preferred not to guess how long Einstein’s theory would last at the forefront of human knowledge in its field. Einstein himself considered his insights to be an “interim station” and tried until the end of his life to deepen the insights beyond the outline he had sketched for the theory of relativity.

  The Gift of Culture

  Culture is the information highway that connects past generations to future generations. World insights, which are, in fact, mental patterns that were acquired by humanity collectively, are passed through culture. The entire human knowledge relies on the incorporation of human brains—i.e., it is networked and spread across the brains of living human beings as collective memory instruments.

  The magnitude of the rooting of memes that can echo throughout a generation and more, while skipping from brain to brain intergenerationally, is reflected in the saying of the great educator Janusz Korczak: “The one concerned with days, plants wheat; with years, plants trees; with generations, educates people.”

  Man was mostly spared the via dolorosa, through which various animals acquire basic insights about the nature of the world, due to human culture that uses the various symbolization
languages and mediates a large treasure of accumulated past knowledge to present generations. Thus, humans become partners to the secrets of the collective wisdom. Access to this huge insights’ library greatly improves the cognitive strength of each individual in human society.

  Culture can be seen as a collection of the best memes—in other words, the collection of the most successful memes that were ever born in the brains of human beings (successful in the sense that they managed to survive the passage of generations and the leaps from brain to brain). This is an agnostic claim, in terms of morality, since some might claim that some of the memetic hits that reside in the brains of people of our time do not pass the test of ethics and are not “moral hits.”

  According to the instrumental view, the quality of an idea is measured according to its practical value—in other words, according to its usability and applicability in terms of solving problems in life. There are memes, such as memes that are connected to the world of art, whose level of instrumentalism is sometimes in question but, nevertheless, managed to survive the test of generations and ages of memetic evolution.

  Along its visible hands, cultural heritage also has invisible hands whose fingers shape the brains of multiple consecutive generations and create a path for our tendencies, which is sometimes hidden from the eyes of consciousness. “The language of culture” we were raised with, in terms of its common world interpretation and the stimulation-response dictionary that is used by it in common circumstances in life, is mostly the language that, according to its grammar rules, we “speak ourselves,” in the sense of behavior.

  The memes that create the core of a cultural heritage routinely infect all brain owners who are raised with the same heritage. Assimilation of the core memes of a certain culture is the main training process the individual goes through on his way to becoming a member of that culture. The memes are the ones that weave the threads of linkage between the individual and the society he belongs to.

  The ability to wipe the traces of these memes is mostly limited and involves agonizing “delearning” efforts.

  Cultural shaping: The values that are assimilated in us, as intergenerational assimilation—the people we have contact with, the experiences we choose to experience (such as which book to read)—are all factors that shape our brain and, sometimes, our fate.

  The shadow of the culture we are raised in is cast over our life. The way of life that is dictated by this culture directly affects our health and thinking patterns.

  In the spirit of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” culture at its best resembles a continuous journey of exiting the shadows’ cave in an attempt to capture the true light of reality.

  Sometimes, however, the “blessing of culture” is, at least partially, a curse. Certain societies and cultures are, in fact, modern shadows’ caves; they pass the “knowledge of the world” through a prism that reflects their values, and the conceptual core they assimilate into the brains of their people is fabricated and unrealistic, or it distorts reality completely. The reality perception of people who live in such societies resembles a “shadows’ show” that reflects the nature of the conceptual, cultural prism that mediates the information more than it reflects reality manifestations as they are.

  The Ages of Wisdom?

  Sources from various times contributed to the wisdom available to our brain:

  The wisdom of climbing hoards DNA-encoded behavioral tendencies that were accumulated throughout man’s evolutionary development and is millions of years old.

  The wisdom of culture hoards the treasure of humankind’s knowledge of the last thousands of years, from the time when abstract symbols, and particularly language and script, became widespread as a means of storing information.

  The wisdom of the group hoards unique knowledge about specific fields, such as in an association of professionals; its age is usually a few dozen years.

  The wisdom of the individual is as old as the person who hoards it.

  To the Personal and Beyond

  Expanding the boundaries of wisdom beyond the personal is based on learning from the experience of others while using the unique tools invented by human culture for passing information.

  In the stories of the sages of various ethnic groups in our world, tradition has a voice. The stories of the sages around the bonfires at night in the African savannas are often told in a way that pleases the ears of various crowds: the crowd of the spirits of the deceased men and women of the clan that hover around at night and, on the other hand, the crowd made of the children of the clan who shudder joyfully.

  “Leave the dead some room to dance,” said Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer who received a Nobel Prize in 1986. He referred to the sense of belonging that binds us by means of memory of the past, the past generation, and the present generation. The memes flow in the waterfall of the generations.

  The Contents of the Safe at the Wisdom Bank

  The number of information pieces that constitute an infrastructure for a complex cognitive skill or a high level skill that reflects expertise (a layer in which a person is considered a master), such as complete mastery of languages or mastery of chess, based on indirect findings, is assessed as approximately fifty thousand pieces of information that relate to the skill and includes both theoretical and practical pieces of information.

  The Steps of Time to the Top of the Tower of Wisdom

  We have innate skills to perceive basic perception impressions, but developing an expert brain that allows us to perceive and differentiate between complexities and nuances in our world requires time and experiences.

  Experts assess that acquisition of a complex skill with a high level of mastery (i.e., acquiring expert skills in a certain field) requires about ten years of concentrated effort, during which a person focuses on the skill for three or four hours a day.

  From another point of view, the amount of practice time needed to become the owner of an “expert brain,” with respect to a complex skill, is estimated as ten thousand hours. It seems that continuous practice that lasts for ten thousand hours creates a neural infrastructure that relies on columns of neurons that serve as a trampoline for insight jumps, which enable the performance of the complex skill at a high and thorough level within a short period of time.

  Memes at the Right Time—the Memetic Gradient

  Multistage memetic selectivity—i.e., graded exposure to insights about reality—is a desirable pattern for matching the information to the level of maturity of the exposed brain and for assimilating correct core values in it, which will grant the brain and the environment in which it develops a satisfactory and fruitful life.

  The memes to which young brains are exposed should match their mental age. The unsightly facts of life should be filtered and softened for the young brain.

  For instance, exposing the brain of a young child to information about abnormal human behavior—such as a horrific affair of a serial killer, which, due to its sensational nature, is reported massively by all media channels—exposes the young child to an extremely distorted value system that might assimilate in his brain an attitude of lack of trust and of suspicion as a prominent personality pattern.

  The above recommendation does not apply to an adult brain. Adults are supposed to encounter the various manifestations in life, including the tragic, unsightly aspects. Indeed, truth should always be our guiding principle, but, exactly as occupational information is fitted to the professional level of an individual, it is not recommended to mix insights of novices, young children, or adolescents with insights of an expert in life—a grownup individual, since, in that case, there is great danger of shaping a young brain in a problematic manner.

  Memes that contain the unsavory facts of life should encounter a young brain in a pattern of a truth gradient that is based on mental age. In other words, insights for kindergarten are different from insights for school years, and from youth movements’ insights, parenting insights or golden age insights.

  It seems
that there is a need for a universal memetic pedagogy determined by an international body (such as the UN organization for education) to struggle with the problem and determine core memes that should be assimilated in the human’s brain in accordance with its location in the ascent of the mountain of the years.

  There are memes that can be defined as “mediating memes” whose purpose is to mediate reality manifestations without compromising their basic nature but, rather, through the necessary adaptations to the containment capability and the mental scenery that is reflected from the eyes of the human being who is exposed to the information.

  The desirable “age of truth,” in which a person should be exposed to all available world knowledge without any mediating memes that “soften reality” is, as some people believe, when a person reaches mental maturity; this is not a specific age but can change from one individual to the next.

  Instilling the core of moral memes, whose purpose is to divert people’s hearts toward generous, humanistic way of thinking, should include a graded pattern of exposing the truth that is easy to digest and assimilate. The magnitude of the bitter taste of life, which hits more violently as people grow older, is an insight that is suitable for an expert’s brain and not for a novice’s brain.

  The Importance of Instilling Morally Correct Memes to Young Brains

  In an era in which the glow of various religions fades away, an organized system of moral memes is a must.

  Also, a person who does not believe in a divine entity can relate to a secular, spiritual testament, such as that heaven might not exist, but we should aspire to be worthy of it. In the absence of an obligatory moral doctrine, local versions of the Marquis de Sade and Dracula could appear in every town or village.