Meme Weaving

Robert Sapolsky, world-renowned lecturer and professor of neurological and biological sciences, gave this talk to a packed audience of students and faculty of all disciplines at Stanford in 2009.

A densely-packed and characteristically lively lecture, consider it a “state of evolutionary anthropology” delivered within a mere 20 minutes.

Discovering the story of humanity continues to reach ever-greater technological complexity and where we stand on the evolutionary ladder will be one of the greatest research accomplishments of this era. The run-away proliferation of information and novelty within our species is most certainly unique; therefore, the importance of understanding the other well-defined ways in which we are unique cannot be overstated.

Sapolsky also points out the implications of recent research on dopamine receptivity and the parallels between chimpanizee and human behavior where rewards are concerned:

“Take a monkey and there’s nothing more addictive out there than the notion that there’s a reward lurking out there, and it’s a MAYBE.

Some of our best social engineers many of them making a good living in Las Vegas learn how to do is how to [create the illusion of] a 50% probability of reward, to make it that salient, when there’s a tenth or a hundredth of a chance of reward.”

The quality of “addictiveness” of a situation, object, or action should provoke the interest of any memeticist, as “mindless” behaviors are often the most frequently copied and repeated, and often with the greatest fidelity from host to host.

When it comes to that delayed reward system, Sapolsky says the uniqueness of humans comes down our capacity to “hold on”. Of all animals, we can carry out chains of actions that take weeks, years, decades, entire lifetimes — all on the premise of the probability of reward.

As Sapolsky points out, that delayed gratification system puts the belief systems of some religions into an explanatory light. After all, what is the meme of heaven if not the ultimate reward for a lifetime of servitude?

The most important piece of the meme hypothesis is that human knowledge is copied, from person to person and from culture to culture, throughout history. This transmission of knowledge between humans forms the basis for civilization. But how and why is human knowledge copied so readily and rapidly?

In this short TED presentation, V.S. Ramachandran introduces the mirror neuron, a piece of the cognition puzzle only recently deduced from neuroscientific study, which could explain the neurological basis for imitation, empathy, and civilization itself.

Reality TV is driving reality. –Cynthia Schneider

On the evolution of “losing gracefully”

I’d like to provide some context for the comment about “Afhgans learning to lose gracefully”. Over the course of the first four seasons of the AFGHAN IDOL program, the behavior of the contestants changed. In the first couple of seasons, those who lost did not always take it well, and sometimes reacted strongly, even violently. This behavior has changed over time as contestants and their fans got used to the ups and downs of winning in losing. In recent Afghan history (Russian occupation and Taliban) there have not been many opportunities to experience winning and losing in what otherwise might be normal activities of sports and talent contests. So, it is not surprising that reactions to winning and losing in the public arena of Afghan Star have evolved over time. –Cynthia Schneider

Some recent entertainment developments in the Arab world might surprise you. But Shereen El Feki’s TEDtalk about the deliberate enmeshing process of Islamic and Western cultures is not just an entertaining 5 minutes…

…it’s also a potent conversational seed, as evidenced by the spirited discussion taking place within the comments on the page for this video, regarding what consititutes “real” adherence to ancient doctrines.

“A hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say LAWYERLY case for rethinking how we run businesses.”

Do hefty bonuses and stringent punishments produce better behavior? Dan Pink wants business to understand that in almost all cases, the traditional motivators certainly don’t — not according to the work of pioneering behavioral economists like Dan Ariely and Steven Levitt.

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does,” says Pink, and it boils down to this: autonomy, mastery, and purpose motivate, while traditional motivators like bonuses and punishments tend to destroy both creativity and productivity. These results have been seen, repeated, and studied for 40+ years by science, while in pedagogy and business they have been completely ignored.

Why the decrease in creativity? According to the research Pink has assembled, having a reward in sight literally narrows our focus. This blinding of peripheral vision reduces the number of possibilities the mind can reach for.

Addendum: Dan Pink offered this clarification on the TEDtalks page under his video:

Dan Pink Aug 26 2009:It’s not the people. It’s the tasks. Some require what psychologists call “algorithmic” — that is, routine, rule-based thinking. Others require “heuristic” thinking — nonroutine, conceptual thinking. For one, If-then rewards work; for the other, they don’t. But, of course, people — all people — can do either kind of task.

Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, presents examples of cognitive illusions that help illustrate why humans make predictably irrational decisions.

Little-known fact! As Dan Ariely reveals in this lecture, he originally wanted to write a book about cooking and lifestyle. For a good chuckle, watch the video to find out what his first book title might have been.

This video has a very semiotician-y feel to it, but if you can get around that, it’s a worthwhile piece on potential applications for memetics in language evolution.

Abstract

Critics of Darwinian, meme-based approaches to cultural history have often pointed out that no empirical phenomena have so far been identified which memetic models can explain better than classical theories, i.e. theories which view cultural history as driven by human agents. Taking this criticism seriously, this paper looks at a few long term trends in the history of English phonotactics, proposes a memetic account of them, and compares it to explanations that have been, or might be offered, on the basis of classical, speaker-based approaches. The paper tries to account for the phenomenon that during the last 1000 years English consonants and consonant clusters have been systematically reduced, deleted, vocalized or even completely lost from the phonemic inventory, while vowels have quite frequently been strengthened (i.e. lengthened and/or diphthongized). Basically, it proposes that this asymmetry results from selective pressures which regularities in the organization of English utterance rhythm have exerted on the memorized shapes of English word forms. It is argued that fixed word-stress and the tendency of utterance feet to be isochronous selected for phonemic elements which could be expressed with variable phonetic duration without being misidentified. In short, the development is seen as resulting from the interaction of linguistic competence constituents which are expressed and transmitted together. The role of speakers in the process is seen as limited to providing the stable physiological environment in which the transmission or replication of competence evolution takes place, the potential effects of intentional and context-specific human behavior on the observed trends in the evolution of English are assumed to sum over, or to cancel one another out. After a possible memetic explanation of the changes is given, the paper discusses whether more or less the same story could not also be told in terms that are presently more established in the discourse of the linguistic community – an opinion which is often voiced at linguistic conferences and which has also made it into printed reviews (e.g. Blevins 2006, Berg 2007 of memetic approaches to language change (such as Ritt 2004). In this paper it is argued that while classical, speaker-centered versions of the account may be possible, they necessarily fail to achieve the explanatory depth of memetic explanations if they do not explicitly account for the rationales which underlie human preferences in behavior, learning, and decision making. As soon as they cease to take them for granted, however, also classically hermeneutic theories of language change wind up deconstructing the very notion of speaker agency by which they are supposedly distinguished from memetic theories. The paper ends by concluding that long term changes in English phonotactics do represent an actual empirical case by which the explanatory value of memetic theory can be demonstrated, although it requires some awareness of the problems involved in assessing the quality of rivaling explanations in order to see this.

The Toronto Semiotic Circle organized a symposium on “Memory, Social Networks, and Language: Probing the Meme Hypothesis II” held at Victoria College (University of Toronto), Northrop Frye Hall, on May 15-17, 2008.