God Soul Mind Brain

out-compete the weaker memes. In this way culture shapes itself as if it were a Petri dish of evolving microbes. The idea of Darwinism on a social level certainly didn’t begin with Dawkins, but he gave it the clearest formal explanation and also a cool name. (The name itself has turned out to be a successful meme; it has entered the popular culture and is in widespread use.) All of the discussion in the previous chapters on social perception takes us unexpectedly to an understanding of memes, of why they spread so readily through human culture and what the underlying brain mechanisms may be.

Emotion enhances imitation

    Learning always works best when it is paired with emotion. When the hypothalamus becomes active and generates an emotion, one of its primary functions is to trigger signals that ultimately spread widely around the brain and announce, in effect, “Whatever you are doing now, learn it, because it has emotional consequences.” Whether the emotion is negative or positive, learning is fast in the presence of it. Don’t we all know it? A dry textbook chapter is almost impossible to remember. An exciting novel, with the constantly shifting emotions that it evokes, is easy to remember. At the extreme is something called a flashbulb memory. You hear momentous news—either a terrible disaster or a sudden windfall—and forever after you remember exactly where you were standing and what you were doing. The surge of emotion ramps up your learning mechanisms and burns the memory into your brain. I was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs tying my sneakers when I heard about the space shuttle Challenger exploding. That was more than twenty years ago and I still remember it.

    The meme that spreads best, that takes hold best in each new person, that lingers longest before fading, is the meme that has an attached emotion.

    For example, as a child, I saw someone take a bite of salami and make a horrible disgust face. I think the process must have gone something like this. I didn’t merely notice that she disliked salami. My social perception went into action and mirrored her disgust. My cortex contacted my amygdala, which contacted my hypothalamus, firing up the emotion of disgust. Because I had the thought, image, and smell of salami and the disgust emotion all at the same time, I learned the link. My amygdala learned the connection that had been temporarily activated. After that, I couldn’t eat salami for years. Never mind the actual taste—in my mind salami was tagged with the quality of disgustingness. I had learned by vicarious experience. This example is an extreme case of one-trial learning, although I think it is also a common case. Learning by observation, whether extreme or subtle, is widespread. It is the main vehicle for becoming culturally indoctrinated.

    Consider the example of politics. We like to think that our political beliefs are informed by reasons and data. Alas, the reasons and the data are usually rationalizations after the fact. Most people come to believe the politics in which they are immersed. They tend to believe what they see the people around them believing. The statistics show that politics is mainly culturally transmitted. The reason why it transmits so well, and is learned so thoroughly, is because politics is not merely a set of ideas. It is a set of ideas linked to powerful emotions.

    Preference in music is also culturally transmitted. We develop strong likes and dislikes attached to this or that genre in music. Where do we get these preferences? Statistically speaking, from the people around us. We tend to like what we see our friends liking. We like what we see the mass of the world liking. We dislike a genre of music if we see enough of our friends grimacing or gagging at it. Not always, of course. We are not helpless imitators. We are not mental clones of each other. But the tendency to imitate is strong.

    Morals, convictions, preferences, disgusts, acceptance of certain practices, rejection of others, these links in the amygdala, these pairings of things and emotions, all spread from person to person, from parent to child, from teacher to pupil, from TV to viewer, from blog to reader, from friend to friend, from stranger to casual observer.

    The memes that I am talking about have a specific structure, like a protein molecule. At one end they have a concept, or an image, or a way of behaving; at the other end they have an emotion; and in between is a