Dear sausage-wrapped impulse repeaters,
The mountains have called again, and my memetic-neural network has determined that it would be most expedient to give them their due before I return to the classroom to infest masses of young people with my suspicious memes about every good boy doing fine and practice making perfect.
When you receive this, I ought to be somewhere near Emigrant Lake, just north of Yosemite, probably slurping down gluey oatmeal and a Camp Mocha (my specialty—one packet Starbucks via, one packet Carnation instant breakfast, and a cupful of water so scaldingly hot that it toes the line of self-vaporizing).
This week and next I’m helping out with a local marching band’s camp. It’s a good warmup to the real deal—teaching—which I haven’t done in over a year, and for which I’m feeling a small amount of anxiety. “Somebody should really start this rehearsal. Who’s in charge here, anyway?”
This week in Writing from California:
The Life of The Mind—from a meme’s point of view
Articles about talking to strangers and the water crisis in the Klamath Basin.
Enjoy!
The Life of the Mind
The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 9
(My website wasn’t running when it was time to go to press, so you can’t read this there this time. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it sometime later this week.)
In the last section, we identified the cycle of replication for a meme.
Mental Object (Host 1) -> Expression -> Physical object (item/action/language/art) -> Impression -> Mental Object (Host 2)-> etc.
Let’s simplify for clarity: Internal -> Expression -> External -> Impression -> Internal…
A meme 1) begins as an internal idea or thought, 2) the idea holder, or host, uses language or action to 3) make some object or word in the physical world, like a bridge or a book, 4) another person sees/hears/notices the object, which returns the idea to 1) the internal world of a new host, where it has completed the cycle and effectively replicated itself.
In this process, the meme passes through two different environments—the external and internal —on its way to replication, and each of those environments has different rules and resources. Since memetic replication differs from physical replication because of the internal world of its hosts, we’ll begin there, and then follow up next time with the impacts of meme expression on the physical world.
The first hurdle a potential meme has to leap in the internal or mental environment is the filtering system of the brain, which determines what information we pay attention to. A variety of systems deal with this filtering, and we won’t go into the specific neurological details here, but in general the filters look for opportunities and threats, and everything else is discarded as noise. It can be helpful to think of your mental filters as a very capable and fast assistant sifting through massive amounts of mail, throwing out the junk mail and delivering everything else to the appropriate department.
If the mail has made it past the assistant, and if it’s an opportunity or threat that requires conscious awareness, then it sends an electrical signal through the nervous system. The first time you perform an action or think a thought, a tiny bit of substance called myelin wraps the neuron in a sausage-like sheath, which makes it a tiny bit more efficient. Think that thought or take that action again, and you get another tiny bit of myelin. Think it a hundred or a thousand times, and you begin to build up thick myelin around the pathway, and it becomes faster and more accurate. “Practice makes perfect,” as any musician knows.
Once an idea or action is in your mind, you need to be able to retrieve it, which is the other function of myelin. One helpful way to think of your nervous system is as a set of filing folders, and the myelin is the notes and papers you save as different pieces of mail pass through the office. Certain folders become easier to find because they are stuffed with so much information that they’ve become bigger than the folders around them. If you use a specific folder often enough, it may even find itself in a special drawer or always sitting on your desk so you can access it instantly.
This double-duty of myelin—encoding and retrieval—means that it will play an important role in both the Impression and Expression of memes.
Some ideas require more conscious processing, and those ideas are processed by the executive function. Usually these are ideas that come into conflict with other ideas, such as opportunities and threats that pit short- and long-term goals against one another. Should you buy that new camera, or save your money? Should you go flirt with that new attractive person, or stay with the one you’re with?
From the point of view of a meme, each step is a potential threat to their replication. It needs to represent a potent opportunity or threat to get past the initial filtering system, it has occur frequently enough to become encoded meaningfully in the nervous system, and it has to create enough of an opportunity or threat that the host will choose to put it back out into the world.
An example is in order to see how this process plays out in the mind.
Let’s use a meme that we’ll call Ida. Ida H. Meme.
Knock-knock
Who’s there?
Ida
Ida who?
It’s pronounced Ida-ho
Now Ida’s goal is to have lots of babies, because that’s just what the memes who survive do (if they didn’t, they wouldn’t really be memes, they’d just be passing thoughts—remember, a meme is a thought that replicates from host to host). In order to have her babies, she first needs to get past your attentional filters. Luckily for her, she has an adorable 8-year-old girl as a host, and you’re not a complete monster, so you kindly pay attention to her joke. Ida makes it past your attentional filters and the combination of the silly punchline and the little girl’s obvious joy causes you to laugh and enjoy the joke. The positive emotion incentivizes you to review the joke and the girl’s delight several times in your head (we tend to do this with all new and emotional experiences, often below conscious awareness), which wraps the firing neurons with myelin. Ida has made herself a little nest in your head.
Later, a friend visits you. You sense an opportunity to share your joy with the friend and build social bonds. Yet you also sense a threat that you could lose status with the friend, who might think knock-knock jokes are childish. Your executive function considers the possible outcomes and makes the decision to go ahead and share the joke. Your friend finds it funny, and Ida H. Meme moves into his mind. You never bother to think how strange it is that Ida is still in your head, too, ready to be shared again. Like an effective parasite, she has multiplied from brain to brain. We have exponential growth, and Ida is well on her way to taking over the mental space of the entire English-speaking population.
I want to go back for a moment and point out the role of emotions, which is to say hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, seratonin, and oxytocin (to name only the most commonly-known examples). These are the resources that memes use to ensure that they will make it through filters, and they use them powerfully. An idea that poses a severe threat to your social status, like an embarrassing faux pas, will quickly make it through your attentional filters and get played again and again in your mind in order to deeply encode it in memory in the hopes that you’ll never embarrass yourself like that again. Faced with a similar situation, you are likely to recall the incident and your executive function will help you avoid making the same mistake. On the other hand, if a joke or a story or piece of interesting information raises our status, we’re more likely to repeat it in new situations. (One caveat: it’s our own perception of status change that matters, not reality.)
So if a meme can harness a strong emotion, like embarrassment or outrage or delight or awe, it is more likely to make it through the entire meme cycle and back to expression. Tall trees get sunlight, fast predators catch more prey, and memes that harness stronger emotions get more mental space. Ida H. Meme’s best chance of replication is to find hosts for whom mild knock-knock jokes in English provide sufficient delight. Tell her to a world-weary professional comedian or someone who only speaks Javanese, and she’s unlikely to get much of a foothold.
I’m hinting at several other revelations about how memes propagate and compete, but for now the important thing to remember is that memes are competing for our mental space and attention, and that one of the most effective ways they can do this is by harnessing emotions to help mark them as an opportunity or as a defense against potential threats. The more extreme the emotion, the better chance they have of passing the attentional filters, being replicated in the myelin pathways, and eventually, of passing back into the physical world through the actions and choices of the host.
So that’s roughly what goes on inside a meme host, how the meme attaches to a host and uses it for its own beneficent or nefarious purposes.
Next time, we’ll talk about the meme resources on the other side of the cycle, where memes pass through the physical world and actually do their spreading. See you soon.
Articles…
Homes lose water as wells run dry in drought-ravaged basin
Water issues make an appearance in this email almost every week. That’s because it’s the most important shared resource that human civilization shares with the natural world, and it has the most immediate and destructive effects when it disappears. I’ve written extensively about the Klamath Basin, including its substantial water problems, and now it appears that the groundwater is disappearing, too, worsening an already dire situation. The problem, like it often does, began with cattle farming.
Why We Should Talk To Strangers More
“Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic.”
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment or a like if you enjoyed this, and please share with someone if you think they’d enjoy it.
Nick
P.S. This newsletter celebrates its 2-year anniversary this week! Thanks so much for being part of it.