From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed 12 Feb 2003 - 16:21:25 GMT
>It's possible that somebody had cropped that tree to make it resemble
>Freddy Krueger, but more likely that a couple kids with overactive
>imaginations all agreed that a tree kinda looked like Freddy, even if it
>just naturally grew that way.
A good examole of what the mind does with what the eye sees. The more
interesting part is what the mind does after it identifies an object as
being in a certain category. For some reason, it often starts making up
stories about the meaning of what was seen as it attempts to fit that
observation into a larger story based on the subject culture.
In the Virgin Mary example, one woman believer was telling the crowd that
the Virgin came back to earth to stop us from going to war with Iraq.
Although nobody there heard a word come out of the image's mouth, messages
and memes were rife as a part of the experience. Emotions, too, played
their part. The dissenter was on the verge of anger with people who claimed
to see a person, although making an image out of the fence post required an
active imagination, while the believers acted more serene and satisfied,
refusing, it seemed to me, to argue back with the disbeliever.
I wonder how many of the kids who saw Freddy Kruger had trouble sleeping
that night. The difference is that nobody really believes in Freddy, but
the Virgin has some 2000 years of storied belief behind her. Statues of her
with bleeding hearts can be found in thousands of churches around the world.
Grant
Grant
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 12 Feb 2003 - 16:19:44 GMT