From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri 07 Mar 2003 - 02:28:51 GMT
At 08:51 PM 06/03/03 +0100, you wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Hernan Silberman" <hernan@well.com>
> > If a meme is pure information, then it's transfer from one medium to
> > another should adhere to the classical model of communications as
> > described by Claude Shannon. A low signal-to-noise ratio could be
> > responsible for the differences between the original incarnation of a meme
> > and the resulting neural representation of it in your head.
snip
I missed this the first time around I guess. You are right of course.
Information transfer between people is always noisy, but noise can be
overridden by repeating the signal a lot of times. (This is exactly
described by the math. It is a square root function where noise is reduced
by the square root of the number of repeats.) The bottleneck for all meme
transmission seems to be on our ability to form memory. Though there are
some counter examples (maybe) in visual processing, virtually all studies
of memory indicate we store at best a few bits per second. (It is the
organization and processing of that information that allows us to look
smarter than you would expect from such a small amount of
information.) For example, you would not expect a person to be able to
pass on how to play baseball with a very short exposure to the game whereas
a person who has played even sandlot baseball a hundred times could teach a
recognizable game to children who had never seen the game before.
Even though reaching into a person's brain and describing the places where
the information is stored is not easy to do as yet, we can be confident
there is an informational difference between a person who can teach
baseball to kids and one who has no idea what this pile of bats, balls, and
mitts are for. The difference is that the "baseball meme" is encoded
(somehow) in the brain of the one who can teach the game.
Keith Henson
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