January 2014 update of the website

Visit the new version of our website.

Mindool: Connect pros and cons to an idea!

We have built a simple yet useful website called Mindool to harvest supporting and opposing ideas from a pool of people: a doodle-like pro & con tree. Do the following:

1) Create an idea,
2) Send the link to those that you want to participate,
3) Enter pro and cons in the tree.

Check out it out: here!

Positive thinking changes memes?

I cut out this extract from an article on positive thinking and pain killers. The author writes

In a series of lab experiments, researchers in Europe found that a patient's expectations about the effectiveness of a pain drug appear to override the properties of the drug itself.

How does this fit into the four-domain model? So, the human system is split into four physical domains: body, environment, memes, and ames. These domains interact and the changes in the domains are behaviours, like feeling less pain. The drug does its part by changing the body, but which domains does the positive thinking affect? I would say that specific memes and ames reduce pain. For example, the person with the higher expectation might have memes like "This pain killer will reduce my pain". But the person might also have positive association to the stimulus "pain killer". Both, the meme and the ame, are activated during information processes in the brain when the signal, reduced by the drug, enters the brain. They lead to a reduction in pain.

Here is an analogy from a big city. High crime levels cause pain to the government. The drug "more police officers" is administrated. The drug has slightly reduced the number of crimes being reported. Moreover, the government strongly believes in the drug, and has memes like "More police means less crime". And ames like a positive association to the sight of police officers. The government will perceive much more pain reduction than just the slight drop in crime rate, because their memes and ames shift the interpretation of the policy. Imagine they did not believe in the meme "More police less crime". They will still feel the pain because they just see a slight decrease.

What I am saying it that the information stored in one's person affects a person's pain level.

Human Connectome Project.

You should check out this NY Times article on the Human Connectome project.

Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind.

The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

They are searching the neurobiological basis of all forms of stored information. That is a very difficult task, and will take many decades. Even when you have mapped all the connections, which seems to be the primary goal of the project, the interpretation of the findings is a big issue. How do you translate a bunch of connections back into information? That is the big obstacle. We know that your name is stored inside of your brain, and in a few decades we might know all of your connections. But connecting name with a set of connections is nearly impossible. And let's not forget: they analyse a dead brain, and not time slices of the same brain.

Nevertheless, it is very clear that memories are physically stored in the brain, that we have thousands and thousands of them, that the memories undergo changes, and that they spread from brain to brain.

Phenotype of memes

There are many definitions of memes, and it's all very confusing. Some define all thought processes as memes. Others define as memes those behaviours that are copied.

We define memes as communicable-via-language memories. This definition has the advantage that the meme is a physical entity, i.e. the memory stored in the brain. What are thoughts processes or copied behaviours? These are for us the phenotype of memes. Like with genes, where (part of) the body is the phenotype of specific genes. Memories in interaction with the rest of the body also create phenotypes. Thoughts are the products of long-term memory plus outside influences, biofeedback, and the interaction of previous thoughts. Also, behaviours that are copied are determined by memories: Without memory, no recurring behaviour.

We exclude non-communicable memory like motor code or sensory memory. They might spread to other spreads but not in a direct way, and we view them more like proto-memes.

Bigger brains for social animals

Here is an article that suggests that a link between the sociality of mammals and the size of their brains relative to body size.

Is this what happened to humans? Is it like Blackmore suggests that memes provide the environment to select for a bigger brain, and this bigger brain led to competition between memes, and these provided the environment to select for a bigger brain.

Copycat research suggest human universal

Check out this research by Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli.

Children learn a great deal by imitating adults. A new study of Australian preschoolers and Kalahari Bushman children finds that a particular kind of imitation -- overimitation, in which a child copies everything an adult shows them, not just the steps that lead to some outcome -- appears to be a universal human activity, rather than something the children of middle-class parents pick up. The work helps shed light on how humans develop and transmit culture.

This research highlights the copycat abilities of humans. We as a species seems to be coded for copying behaviours. Might this be the crucial differences between us and other primates that acts as the starting basis for a memetic evolution? Maybe we have by evolutionary accident acquired a strong ability to copy behaviour blindly. The copying leads to a spread of learned behaviours stored within a brain to other brains. Useful behaviour are maintained, and other discarded. Some individuals might glue two behaviours into a new behaviour which is imitated again. Over ten thousands of years, imitation is genetically selected for, and so is gluing behaviour together. This might explain the emergence of language. And so on...