Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  How Do You Say Snow in Eskimo?

  You say it in dozens of different ways, according to the unique features of the observed snow.

  Human languages are similar to each other due to the very similar physiological and mental traits among the various groups that compose human race. Special populations that live in climate zones that are characterized by “extraordinary” features—such as the Inuit, who live in areas close to the Arctic, and, alternately, the Tuareg clans, the wanderers of the Sahara desert—have developed unique linguistic features that reflect the “ecological niche” they live in.

  There are memes that are valid in specific ecological or cultural niches and not in others (sectorial memes) and, on the other hand, universal memes that are valid among all people in the various time and space zones. Civilizations’ clashes often derive from clashes of sectorial memes. One possible way to resolve such conflicts is searching for a universal meme that contains components of sectorial memes of both sides of the conflict.

  Focusing the investment on core values in the shape of universal memes is the means that paves the way for improvement of humanity. Discrimination based on ethnicity is improper, but, on the other hand, discrimination based on memes is required and essential. Although cultural relativism adds a dimension of complexity to the characterization of the core values of human universal memetics, it must not prevent the distinction between a meme that is dangerous to the future of humanity, such as memes that discriminate on an ethnic basis, and memes that promote improvement and harmony between people. The meme of cultural relativism, which takes into account the uniqueness of the various human cultures, cannot provide an overall excuse for morally faulty behaviors. Examples for that, from the darkest end of the repertoire of behaviors that were accepted (some of which still exist) in certain human societies, are female circumcision and cannibalism. The future of humanity will be determined according to the memes that are common in the brains of human beings in our generation and the next ones. Thus it is critically important to create core memes (universal moral ideas) and instill them in our children. These will be the memes that will promote the future of the human race and will prefer universal considerations over sectorial ones. Beneficial memes might constitute “perpetuum mobile” of grace.

  We should instill an anthropocentric scale of values, such that puts man at the center but is also generous and considerate toward the surroundings: animals, plants, and whatever else is around.

  It is essential to design a human memetic codex that will be composed of beneficial universal memes whose carrier is not only contemporary, but a person of all times. Perhaps this wish is somewhat utopian and is not realistic enough, and a more realistic aspiration would be to create a core of universal memes that will be updated during each period according to the challenges with which humanity deals, some of which cannot be viewed from our contemporary point of view.

  Aspects of Memes’ Classification

  Heuristics

  Generalizations of all types are inclusive memes; although they commit the sin of generalization, they still serve as essential anchoring points for making decisions that grant us a quick leap in terms of our prediction ability regarding specific circumstantial scenarios. Nevertheless, sometimes they tend toward extreme stereotypes, which are overgeneralizations that are not supported by evidence.

  Heuristics are a sort of general super-meme that outlines a fast-access lane for “solving problems,” such as all sorts of “rules of thumb,” but sometimes they contain built-in bias, which makes them less compatible to the world of phenomena around us.

  Interface Memes

  The replicability of “interface memes”—which restart the screen of consciousness in borderline situations in which the modes of consciousness change, such as the very first moments after we wake up in the morning, when half of our brain is still in the land of sleep and the other half is already awake—enables the replicability of perception and memory. Instead of building “basic world insights” from anew every morning, we can look ahead from the shoulders of all our past days, which provided us with “shortcut” insights about the world. The awakening confusion (the hypnopompic state) in the first minutes after waking up from a night sleep is mostly characterized by numbness, and then the basic perceptional memes (basic activating system) pop up on the screen of consciousness and restart our mental activity in a wakefulness “mode.”

  Detached Memes

  Detached memes are these memes that do not find an anchoring point among the memes that already exist in the brain and do not manage to network themselves within the neural infrastructure that encodes information. In such a state, the thread of their life is short, and they are prone to falling into the abyss of oblivion.

  Memes from Nature

  Imitable memes do not only constitute some of the most successful tricks of memetics, they might also be a source of inspiration in terms of changing the purpose of a meme. Numerous memes exist around us and around natural appearances that surround us. An invention induced by memes coming from nature is called biomemetics. An invention in the spirit of biomemetics is ascribed, inter alia, to Leonardo da Vinci. The inspiration for the spiral staircase he thought of probably came from observing the internal skeleton of seashells.

  The inspiration for the development of Velcro came from sticky plants. Other ideas in the spirit of biomemetics include a desalination method that imitates the way mangrove trees growing in salt water refine the water into fresh water; ideas for sterilization of operating rooms taken from the scales of Galapagos sharks, which are hostile toward all sorts of bacteria that live in the ocean; gathering dew from fog in arid areas by imitating the Namib desert beetle, whose body is a walking dew trap; and “artificial neurons networks”: information processing apparatuses that imitate the information processing pattern of human brain cells.

  Memes and Language

  The treasure of language contains the concentrated wisdom of multiple generations. Language terms are creations of different brains. Language memes (i.e., its various terms) have shown an excelling survivability and competence in terms of patterning the world.

  Language and culture in general are clusters of memes that survived multiple “brain generations” and have been upgraded and adapted to the world of phenomena. Language and culture in general are always in the midst of a continuous improvement.

  Language, as a collection of memes, constantly gives birth to “mutations,” as is the case with memes. A main expression of these mutations is slang, which frequently changes.

  The birth of a lingual meme starts with the spring of thought and ends when the words are uttered in the “mouth’s estuary.”

  The ease with which human babies acquire language makes us think, sometimes, that our brain is, among other things, a biological word processor.

  The meaning of words mostly constitutes semantic knowledge that lacks personal shade but enables symbolic conceptualization of world entities, which is accessible to all.

  The word that represents a certain entity is, most of the time, an arbitrary convention that cannot be inferred logically, except for a few words whose sound is onomatopoeic to the entity they represent. It seems, however, that there is a partial genetic tendency for a correlation between entity and sound, as was shown in the Bouba-Kiki study that was described in the chapter about perception.

  The expression “different language, different soul” suggests that each language cherishes cultural memes.

  The cultural load that is weaved into each language wires the brain of its speakers in a unique pattern.

  Language reflects, in more than one way, the patterns that the human brain tends to produce.

  Human culture has developed a number of conceptualization manners through symbols: alongside language, which is the main one, there is also music, mathematics, etc.

  Language allows for reality representations that are in changing correlation with the true nature of things. Language creates reality
representations, part of which are artificial creatures that are based more on language than on reality.

  Our brain prefers narrative information to numeric information. Our brain likes letters more than it likes numbers. Words are usually loyal servants of memes. When they fail to be so, however, it can be frustrating, as reflected in the words of the author Gustave Flaubert: “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” Some see the limited conceptualization capabilities of language as a “prison of consciousness,” as reflected in the resolute words of the writer José Saramago regarding the built-in limitations of words: “Human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.”

  Yet, it seems that we cannot disagree with the fact that innovative memes that are conceptualized through language sometimes open our eyes and expand our mind, in the sense of providing conceptual perception of layers of meaning that were previously concealed from the eye of consciousness.

  A super-meme may be formed by a creation of a new entity out of the blue. A meme that is poured into a mold of words may change the way we look at the world. Words have an ability to create new worlds by turning the eyes of our mind toward a direction that was not examined in the past.

  On the other hand, due to the importance of language in terms of our reality perception, whatever is not represented by language is prone to being shifted sideways to the outermost part of consciousness or, even, becoming totally concealed from the eyes of perception.

  The categorical array of language structures our worldview, to a great extent, in the sense of “the limits of my language are the limits of my soul.” Language creates distinction between details within the world image, which are sometimes artificial creatures that are not segregated entities by nature. These details are taken from the environment, selected by a linguistic tweezers, and their selection grants them “classified distinctness” that is sometimes justified, regarding their objective nature, and sometime is not.

  In an attempt to bridge the language gaps between people, which make it difficult for the memes to pass from one brain to another, several super-languages were proposed. In the late eighteenth century, Wilhelm Leibniz started to develop a language that he hoped would become a global language. This language was named “Characteristica Universalis,” and its script was based on mathematical foundations.

  The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath proposed a picture-language that he hoped would turn into a global language, and he expressed its basic concept as “Words divide us, pictures unite.”

  Chapter 12: Unity of Contradictions—Two Minds, One Brain—the Hemispheres

  Development of the Hemispheres

  The right hemisphere develops more rapidly during infancy. It experiences an accelerated growth period, which starts when the baby is born until about the age of two and enables the brain to establish perception skills from the very first time it encounters the world. The left hemisphere develops more slowly and keeps changing—even long after birth. Some claim that, as our brain gets older, the effect of the left hemisphere on its conceptual and linguistic capabilities grows, and its inhibitive effect on the right hemisphere becomes more intense.

  There are cases described in medical literature in which an entire cerebral hemisphere is injured and the affected person keeps on living with only one functioning hemisphere. An example of that is a baby girl whose left hemisphere, due to a problem in the left common carotid artery, which constitutes a central source of blood supply to half of the brain, almost did not develop while she was an embryo, and, consequently, only her right hemisphere was functioning when she was born.

  This patient accomplished, through self-training, some impressive achievements with regard to remembering details. Abstract thinking, however, such as interpreting proverbs, was difficult for her. In addition, she suffered from a prominent impairment in her right field of vision and weakness on the right side of her body.

  Other examples are known from the cases of patients who underwent “hemispherectomy”—a broad, rare operation in which a whole hemisphere (left or right) is removed. In the extremely rare cases of people who function with a single hemisphere, the questions that are asked include which functions survive when the cerebral living space is reduced by half? Will complex abilities, such as rich verbal expression, distinguishing between nuances of emotions, and the like (in accordance with the injured areas), survive? And “how much brain” is needed in order for a person to “be a person”?

  Structural and Functional Characteristics of the Hemispheres

  The range of structural and functional differences between the two hemispheres is broad and stretches from the micro level to the macro level.

  A central structural difference between the two cerebral hemispheres, which also has functional implications, is embedded in the connectivity pattern, which is different among the different areas within the hemispheres: the neural channels in the right hemisphere are more prone to connecting remote brain areas, while in the left hemisphere they are more prone to connecting adjoining brain areas.

  Another important difference derives from information processing processes in the two hemispheres: the right hemisphere is more prone to “multichannel” information processing, while the left one is more prone to “monochannel” information processing. The right hemisphere prefers processing at the areas of the multisensory associative cortex (multichannel), which merges perception impressions from several senses into a single coherent experience. The left hemisphere gives priority to processing at areas of the cortex that are devoted to monosensory input—i.e., the information that is mediated by a single sensory organ, such as the auditory cortex to which the auditory input is channeled from the ears.

  It may be that the inclination of the right hemisphere toward multichannel processing gives it an advantage when dealing with new information and of serving as the preferred home port for sailings to the land of imagination.

  In the service of the transportation of the signals that sustain the interhemispheric dialogue, there are “latitudinal roads” that are composed of clusters of axons, which mediate transfer of information between the two hemispheres, such as the tracks called the corpus callosum and the anterior and posterior commissure.

  Among two-thirds of left-handed people, the hemispheric expertise profile is similar to that of right-handed people. Among one-third of the left-handed people, it seems that the hemispheric expertise profile is inverted, as in a mirror image.

  Typical Thinking Skills of the Hemispheres

  We have two hemispheres and multiple opinions about them:

  From the mid-1970s, the common division of the brain was according to features of hemispheric expertise. Abstract and symbolic skills, such as language and arithmetic, are traditionally ascribed to the left half of the brain. The right half was traditionally viewed as the residence of nonverbal skills, orientation, and imagination. The left hemisphere was characterized as rationalistic, logical, and as the half that prefers verbal conceptualization. On the other hand, the right hemisphere was characterized as processing information in a holistic pattern and as attentive to emotions and spatial information.

  Another common assumption is that the right brain excels in parallel processing—i.e., simultaneous processing of pieces of information that are merged into a coherent insight. Serial processing is usually ascribed to the left brain. It seems that both hemispheres have the ability to process information in a serial or parallel pattern, but they have different tendencies.

  Another common characterization sees the left hemisphere as the one that contributes the most to self-identification and the hemisphere that generates self-awareness, whereas the right hemisphere is considered to be the main contributor to identification of others.

  There is evidence that suggest that, while an experience is being processed, the left pref
rontal lobe is in charge of gathering the various details while the right one is in charge of extracting core ideas out of the whole experience (separating the wheat from the chaff) and getting the “point.”

  The left hemisphere is more oriented to creating compatibility between the perception impressions and the patterns (the memes) that are stored in the hemisphere, and from time to time the “Baron Munchausen” arises within it and fabricates “evidence” in order to create the desired compatibility.

  It seems that the left brain has a central role in connecting the patches of our being into a unified quilt, a coherent being.

  The right prefrontal cortex is the core of our brain’s crystal ball, or the womb from which our foresight is born. This area produces continuous prediction in terms of potential future scenarios. The prediction capacity of people who suffer from impairment in the functioning of the right prefrontal lobe is damaged.

  The separated self, in each of the two hemispheres, has a tendency to hope—from the left—and a tendency to color reality in a gloomy shade—from the right. Cynics might say that hope is not a strategy, but it is important in terms of motivating mental processes and in terms of mental resistance. Truth in itself, when it is not diluted by hope, can resemble a bitter medication. The human goblet of the soul is filled with straight interpretation of reality along with a certain amount of hope. The mix between the two varies and depends on the circumstances. Pouring hope into the cocktail of reality perception is sometimes essential in order to create continuous inner mental motivation. The hemisphere that inspires hope—i.e., the left hemisphere—often moderates the tendency to give strict interpretations to most reality manifestations reflected from the eyes of the right hemisphere. Our reality test eventually derives from this inter-hemispheric dialogue.