A head full of memes
Why aren't you more like me?
I hope that by now you accept that ‘society’ is a learned, and therefore memetic, construct. But as with all things, we learn 'society' at different rates, and have filters that prevent us from accepting some ideas.
Of course, a lot of the differences between individuals are genetic in origin, but I think a lot of them are memetic. Not everybody has been exposed to the same set of memes (except in theocracies and single-party states). Even if they were, not everybody has the same background, meaning that they would almost certainly filter the memes differently. And even if everybody did filter the memes in the same way, it is quite likely that differences in the structures of the brain would result in different absorption and storage patterns. The memes would end up being embedded more or less strongly in the selfplex, meaning that they would run with different ‘strength’.
So it is quite impossible for two people in a developed society to have the same values or the same way of thinking. And perhaps ill-fitting members of society - individuals we regard as odd, selfish or maladroit - are those with low porosity, who accept memes slowly and are therefore unable to adopt the society’s norms.
So here we have a plausible hypotheses for differences in personality, in terms of the memes people have absorbed and the relative strengths at which they run.
Meme enslavement
Developing this idea of memes being run with different strengths, a meme might get thoroughly out of hand. If that is the case, then the mind could be entirely enslaved by a single idea, such as a fear of contamination meme that leads to obsessive washing behaviours.
People do get dominated by memes - especially religious memes - to the point that their behaviour becomes pathological, and this is consistent with our observations on the monomania that we sometimes see in societies and in businesses.
These memes can be ones that harm the carrier (either actively or by disrupting normal interactions with others) or that have consequences for the carrier through the harm they cause him to do other people; but of course the meme doesn’t care.
A much milder form of infection is the ‘earworm’ - that irritatingly catchy tune that you just cannot get out of your head. James Kellaris, marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, has said that: Earworms seem to be an interaction between properties of music (catchy songs are simple and repetitive), characteristics of individuals (levels of neuroticism) and properties of the context or situation (first thing in the morning, last thing at night or when people are under stress).
Daniel J. Levitin, whose book This is Your Brain on Music (2006) is a fascinating study of how music interacts with the human brain, claims that medications that are used to treat OCD or anxiety can alleviate the symptoms of earworms, which would support either a biological or memetic argument for these conditions.
Learning bad behaviours
We should also remember that, while memes drive our behaviours, they are reinforced by the limbic brain, not the conscious brain. Brodie (1996) cites a lovely example of a fictional child who, in an attempt to get attention from his mother, sulks and screams. It seems to work, and so he builds it as a working meme into his mental programming. Brodie continues:Thirty years later, that two-year-old boy is now a 32-year-old man in a job where he doesn’t feel appreciated - we have office buildings full of adults sulking, throwing tantrums, cajoling and smiling in an unconscious and ineffective effort to satisfy some unmet need.
I’ve always suspected that some of the behaviour I’ve seen in boardrooms of public companies could be attributed to bad parenting, and now Brodie has explained why.
Creativity
Accepting memes slowly can be a good thing - this mental immune system can stop harmful ideas from being absorbed (we'll add an article about suicide cults at a later date) but it also limits creativity. It is entirely possible for a newly introduced meme to be supported by one part of the selfplex and to be actively fought against by another. If a meme sneaks its way past the consistency filters in our brain, we experience a mild form of meme poisoning known as cognitive dissonance. This results from the tension that arises when you have two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behaviour that conflicts with your beliefs about yourself.
This war of ideas can lead to fits of creativity, neatly covered in Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind (2007), and F. Scott Fitzgerald held the view that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’.
However, just as self-doubt can cripple an organisation, sustained cognitive dissonance can lead to unhappiness and depression as your cherished beliefs are undermined from within.