How Internal Memes Infect Your Brain ∞ Fletcher Wortmann

Have you ever heard something, and then instantly wished that you hadn’t? The experience is like something out of a horror story, like a creepy nursery rhyme that summons an evil spirit, or a forbidden book that drives the reader mad.

Dangerous, infectious ideas aren’t just fiction, but they aren’t supernatural, either. In the post, “Why Did I Think That: Your Internal Memes,” I discussed the mental ecosystem of the mind’s “internal memes” — ideas that compete to catch your attention and then make it impossible to think about anything else. Sometimes these thoughts are distracting or annoying but basically harmless, like getting a song stuck in your head. But other recurring thoughts, like those associated with OCD, depression, and trauma, can be upsetting and painful. If a meme is any idea that gets in your head, then an “infohazard” is a meme that’s actively harmful to its host.

Just like viruses and bacteria, infectious memes have developed a variety of strategies to sneak around or fight past your psychological defenses. But just as you can boost your physical immune system, you can also strengthen your mental immune system against these parasitic ideas. And it starts with learning how those bad ideas get in your head in the first place.

An infectious meme, like any disease, begins with exposure. You catch a cold by touching, eating, or breathing it in. A meme, however, only needs to catch your attention. In “What Makes a Meme Successful,” Francis Heylighen writes that a meme must be “noticed, understood and accepted by the host.” “The main criteria at the assimilation stage are novelty (facilitates assimilation by attracting the subject’s attention) and simplicity (requires less processing for the meme to be understood) … memories that cohere are more easy to retrieve and use and are therefore less likely to be forgotten.”

Like a cuckoo bird laying eggs in a songbird’s nest, memes can also trick you into accepting them by mimicking good ideas. The mind is just as easily occupied by an important idea as it is by an idea that it mistakenly perceives as important. A meme that catches you by surprise, that seems to be urgent or threatening, will immediately take top priority in your mind, even if it’s a false alarm.

There are also specific environmental conditions that allow infectious memes to thrive, the way heat and humidity help to breed mosquitos in the summer. If your environment is stressful, unfamiliar, or disorienting, then your psychological defenses are already lowered, and you may not have the cognitive resources you need to notice and reject an obviously bad idea. On the other side of the coin, boredom is a powerful environmental stressor. The human brain is designed to process and internalize a constant feed of information (our “need for cognition”). So when the mind isn’t completely engaged, its surplus processing power can be co-opted by a new meme: “A silent person is an idle copying machine waiting to be exploited,” as Susan Blackmore writes in The Meme Machine.

But getting your attention is just the first step. To be properly internalized, the meme must build connections to your other thoughts, memories, and beliefs – a process called relational framing. Relational frames make sense of new ideas by defining them in the context of old ones. For example, two simple relational frames are a correlation (e.g., I like Alice, people I like are “friends,” so “Alice” equals “friend”) and contrast (e.g., I dislike Bob, so “Bob” does not equal “friend”). Every time the internal meme creates a new relational frame, it carves out a new path it can exploit to hijack your thinking. According to Relational Frame Theory (RFT), language itself is basically a complex relational network of sounds, symbols, and definitions – a kind of mental dictionary or thesaurus — so just putting a meme into words creates a ton of connections.

This can lead to problematic associations, particularly between opposing ideas. Richard Dawkins addressed this in The Selfish Gene, his original treatise on meme theory: “[E]ach building block has an affinity, not for its own kind, but reciprocally for one particular other kind… a template not for an identical copy, but for a kind of ‘negative,’ which would in its turn re-make an exact copy of the original positive.” Jacques Derrida poetically called this phenomenon “hauntology” – the eerie persistence of the absence of absence. Speaking practically, Niklas Törneke’s Learning RFT explains, “[T]hings are always related to their opposites, as well as to a number of other things… Even our good experiences are related to bad ones. Pain can be present anywhere.” This is why attempting to ignore negative thoughts only makes them stronger – the so-called “thought suppression paradox” familiar to sufferers of purely-obsessional OCD. When you consciously try to ignore a thought, you’re activating and reinforcing that oppositional frame.

One of the mind’s most important relational structure is also a major vulnerability: narrativity, or story-telling. The human mind absolutely loves composing, telling, and retelling familiar stories. Think of the three-act story progression in blockbuster films, the setup, and punchline of a joke, or the thesis-evidence-conclusion structure of a three-paragraph essay. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur explains this function in Time and Narrative: “[T]he configurational arrangement transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole which is correlated to the act of assembling the events together and which makes the story followable. Thanks to this reflective act, the entire plot can be translated into one ‘thought.'” So, stories are useful because they condense a lot of information into a comprehensible, memorable, and sharable whole. When a meme is presented in the form of a story, it will instantly seem more credible and plausible, regardless of whether that story is logical or true.

Using these criteria to diagnose a new internal meme may allow you to recognize and reject it before it becomes a difficult recurring thought – the same way basic hygiene protects you against infectious diseases. When you realize that a new thought is bothering you, consider: How did this thought get my attention in the first place? Does it seem surprising, urgent, or threatening — and am I assessing this perceived threat accurately? Is the thought attached to my other thoughts – either through agreement or contradiction? Is my environment boring or uncomfortable, and could that be influencing my thinking? And finally, am I just repeating a convincing story, even if it’s untrue?

The best way to fight bad ideas is with better ones.

References

Susan Blackmore. “Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device.” Cybernetics and Systems, Vol 32:1, 225-255, 2001, Taylor and Francis, Philadelphia PA

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press, 1999

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1st ed. 1976, 30th Anv. Edition 2006