Meme

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I was watching What Makes Us Human on my TIVO last week.

They were talking about human brains and at the end they talk about how people mimic each other. They look at each other and they copy what other people say. In London, they had all these people, about five of them, come in and sit down at the table but they are all actors and none of them know it. The doctor shows them three lines and asks them which one is longer. None of them respond at first. But one of them says "Three" The next person says "Three" and the next. The doctor shows the next three lines on another chart and people do the same again. No response, then one of them responds, then the next, then the next one and they are all saying the same answer.
The show did that to show an example of how people copy what other people say, copy what they do.

I never knew this. Now I wonder when I hear opinions, I will wonder if it's their true opinions or are they just saying it to blend in because they are doing the neme thing again.


Did anyone see the show or ever hear about this?


I knew about peer pressure but didn't know it had a name.

I try to have my own opinions and my own views, instead of copying other people. I quit doing it in my middle school years because I wanted to be myself, not try and be like everyone else by doing what they do, or wearing what they wear, or having the same views as them. Anyone else the same way as me?


EDIT: Fixed the word in the title.

Last edited by Spokane_Girl on 04 Apr 2008, 3:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think you are talking about "meme", not "neme". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Yes, it is a fascination of mine, to watch memes in action. I like to observe trends in YouTube, 4chan, ytmnd, and other pop culture sites of the internet and see how things get popular then evolve. It's not really peer pressure, it's more of a contemporary idea... I have my ideas that involve Jungian psychology and the collective unconscious but I won't go into that here.

Hi, sorry to be pedantic, but I think you mean "meme" not neme.

A meme is a way of interacting with others that is passed, sometimes from generation to generation. The example you gave is of a minor meme, however there are much bigger ones. The biggest are religions. Have you ever noticed how people tend to pick up the religion associated with their parents and pass this on to their own children. True of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism etc with very few of those people really questioning the fact that they've inherited a form of social interaction / belief system. Another description I've heard is comparing some of these belief systems to a sort of "mind virus" - a belief system that propagates in a way similar to a computer virus but via our minds instead. Controversial stuff if you think about it.

Conformity and memes are a breakdown of the social learning process. Social learning can be of benefit (e.g., learning one's job duties/expectations from coworkers).

Memes are not conformity or a breakdown of anything. Memes are the natural end product of any society. If it weren't for memes, you wouldn't have any sayings or nursery rhymes, epic poems passed on generation to generation, jokes, or many other cultural bits.

"The Language Organism". The Leiden Theory of Language Evolution. Prof Dr. George van Driem at:

http://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf

"Meanings in natural language have the properties of non-constructible sets. Through these "sets" meanings, together with the corresponding neuronal representation of its associated linguistic form, replicate themselves from brain to brain".

"Language is a symbiotic organism". "We have acquired a genetic predisposition to serve as hosts for this symbiote". "The units of this self-replicating core are neuronal correlates of signs".

"A meaning thrives by virtue of its applications, which can not be deduced from its implications. The implications of a meaning must be derived by its applicability".

"Syntax arose when a signal was first split".

Frederik Kortlandt " On the Parasitology of Non-constructible sets". at:

http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art206e.pdf

"The exploratory behaviour of linguistic meanings in the human brain bears a strong resemblance to ant foraging".

"Once meanings began to reproduce within the brain, hominid brain evolution came to be driven by language at least as radically as any symbiote determines its host species". "Richard Dawkins et al fell short of identifying the fecund high-fidelity replicators of extra-genetic evolution".

"Language meanings correspond to sets which are indeterminate in that there is no a-priori way of saying whether a particular referent can or cannot be identified as a member of a set". ( eg: the word "open" can be applied to a door which is shut, if it is not locked!)

"God is the super-meme, the quintessential prototype of the non-constructible -set because it can mean anything". "Religion ( can be seen) as a disease of language".

I was reading about all this today; it's fascinating.

Last edited by ouinon on 04 Apr 2008, 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Conflicts of belief, arguments, are actually attempts by the "language organism" to impose/reproduce a certain neural network/grouping formation on/in someone elses brain. In attempting to understand what you are arguing, if I do attempt it/hear you, my neurones start forming themselves into "shapes" as if were a hand trying to catch a ball.

Somebody posted a super link recently about how incredibly active, constantly changing, the neuronal connections are in brains, even in adults. Will go look for it.... it was Mage! , at:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt60682.html

Sleeping on something and waking up with a new understanding is because your neurones have connected differently overnight. In response to an idea/meaning/meme.

Just wondering; should this go in the Philosophy, Religion and Politics Forum?

Though the implications are enormous for people with different language-use/construction in our society, and so is potentially highly relevant to AS issues.

The massive frontal lobe of homo sapiens is a tumour caused by language.

I have a particularly bad case of language!

I think it is interesting that van Driem describes the process of exposure to language as "inoculation". Perhaps in the same way as many people on the Autistic spectrum are highly sensitive to foods in the gut, to sensory stimuli, etc, perhaps they are especially sensitive to the introduction of language, as if it were actually an invading virus, and produce different neuronal reactions to this "foreign body" compared to NTs.

The article that Mage quoted, and which I linked to, shows how the immune system may be hugely involved in controlling/regulating the structure and therefore the functioning of the brain. What if the peculiar, as in particular, asperger relationship with language and to memes was the result of a kind of exaggerated defence reaction to the presence of this "organism" language?

What if, to refer back to Mage's remark about the Collective Unconscious, NTs were actually the most in touch with theirs, acting out the age old archetypal relationships and dramas relatively undisturbed by language. Whereas people on the AS are separated off to some extent from that ( collective) part of their functioning by their huge reaction, one way or another, to language?

I take language so seriously. I remember the huge rages I experienced in early days in France when a "Do Not Disturb" sign on a hotel room door did not stop staff entering. I was outraged by this complete inattention to language. Since earliest childhood language has been a deeply serious affair.

Deciding to believe in god recently has helped enormously because by introducing the "set which contains all other sets" in language, by explicitly believing in "creation" of language's matrix, I have in a sense quarantined language. I see it now. I know that I am colonised! Someone I was reading describes it as the "inner zombie".

I do like the description of the search for meaning as "ants foraging". It does feel like that.

I didn't mean to have this thread be about religion but it happened to lead to that topic.

Not all children pass the religion down to their kids they got from their parents. My mother grew up Catholic and she didn't like it so she stopped the religion when she moved out of her parents.
My ex grew up with religion too and he stopped it when he was an adult. He believed in god too and then he stopped in his late 30's.
I was told about god by my mother and he made earth and people, trees, food, he made the sun. But then as I got older I found out more and it had nothing to do with god. We make the food, people come from people, my parents made me. Also the fact that dinosaurs don't exist in the bible but it's been proven they lived. Their bones were discovered. I read about evolution, I read how the earth may have been formed. Also I figured, why would god make me different and have me be bullied by other kids and embarasse me in sixth grade by giving me a woman's body that young. I used to believe he put me on earth so that I can be made fun of and treated badly by everyone but I didn't understand why he would do that. So I figured, he isn't real, they're just stories. Jesus might have existed but I don't believe he had special powers.


There were things I learned in my childhood and still do it, some I learned I don't do because I don't agree with it or I found out my mother was wrong. When I was five, my mother told me you turn into a star when you die. I found out when I was about nine, you don't turn into a star when you die because I learned what stars were made out of. Also the fact that the sun is a star. I knew that since second grade when we learned about our sun.

Religion is just one example of memes. It was until about 500 years ago one of the most efficient producers of language, of memes, but isn't any longer. It just remains a part of a great many memes in consequence.

But there are plenty of other memes in circulation, carried in the spore structures called language!

I think that the fact that people on the autism spectrum have a different relationship with language than the average or majority, experiencing language in a different way, is why we relate differently to memes, to all those "meanings"/codes all around us. We don't integrate language as seamlessly and so we aren't so under the control of "memes". They feel like an imposition, or illogical, futile, unnecessary.

John Christopher's children's book, called "The White Mountains", about the domination of our planet by an alien race who move about in gigantic tripods, describes how the tripods use a "cap" which they apply to all humans after a certain age, and it renders them docile. Most people. Because it turns out that the cap does not "take" with some people and they go mad, or wonder at a loss from place to place, alone.

Maybe language is a bit like that. And many people on the spectrum are people on whose brains the cap of language , whose structure is adapted/evolved to fit the average brain, does not "take" And so most "memes" remain distant, incomprehensible, like behaviour by another species.

I am thinking more of the so-called Internet memes like lolcats, which are devoid of intelligence. Similarly stupid memes regularly pass through popular culture and the news media.

Memes are not stupid, or intelligent. Only failures or successes. The most successful are those you use without even noticing, every day.

Was reading a paper by Nick Chater and Morten Christiansen, called "Language as Shaped by the Brain", in which they argue that language evolved in response to our brains processing and acquisition capacities and transmission possibilities. Language which was too difficult/alien for the majority brain just died off. The language of today is one that is adapted to an average brain.

We obviously have different criteria. I find the spreading of a YouTube video of a guy getting hit in the balls crass and stupid but not funny. Apparently such things are successful at spreading, but that's not especially relevant to me.

Now if by meme you mean any old idea, I think there have been some good ones over time: democracy, fairness, the Enlightenment—to name a few.

Well, think of it this way. The tales of Robin Hood and his merry men have been retold for hundreds of years. lolcats probably has maybe 2 more years before it burns out. The good ones do tend to last.