Meme Weaving

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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.

Illusions, when they have equivalent and predictable effects on the vast majority of people, can tell us much about the arcane wiring of our brains. Al Seckel, world-renknowned cognitive neuroscientist and illusion specialist, surprised and delighted a crowd at TED in 2004 by subjecting them to phantoms of perception they couldn’t avoid, even when they knew the tricks ahead of time.

As one commenter put it, this talk is all about “how perception is deceived and how our deception is perceived.”