From: Kate Distin (memes@distin.co.uk)
Date: Wed 18 Jan 2006 - 10:50:47 GMT
My guilt fades away, because at this point the new book *is* actually
relevant.
You're right, of course, about teenage questioning. Adolescence has
been described as a time in which you dismantle everything you've been
given so far, and rebuild it in the way you want it to be from now on.
I hadn't thought of this memetically until you put it like that. And,
despite what I've just written in reply to If, this sort of questioning
does seem to become stronger in the teen years (roughly speaking, as you
say) than it was in young childhood. I really like your idea of our
having been bioligically selected to accumulate a stack of memes and
then, later, reflect on them and sift them for our own use. I also like
the extra link that you draw between toddlerhood and adolescent, which
emotionally are of course very similar phases.
What's interesting about gifted (by which I just mean very clever; not
genius) children is that this adolescent process may not happen at the
same age as for others. Partly this is because they have *always*
tended to ask questions, to challenge what they are told, to reflect
more on the alternatives (to meta-represent). One of the writing group
for this book put it like this: the gifted child is like the little boy
in the emperor's new clothes, always popping up and saying "hey - just
because everyone thinks so doesn't make it true!"
I'm also interested in what you say about empathy. My understanding was
that, during the period of adolescence, teenagers are actually pretty
poor at empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen sees empathy partly in terms of
self-control, and of course with all those hormones leaping about,
self-control is not going to be the adolescent strong point.
Hmmm. This model you sketch, of absorbing then questioning memes, does
actually seem to make a serious point of the flippant opening to your
message. It almost seems worth parents telling their young children the
opposite of what they believe! And there's a further question in my
mind now: why do many people (most people?) stop questioning things when
they get beyond adolescence? The newly-shuffled memes seem to settle
into that pattern for life, in many cases.
Kate
Chris Taylor wrote:
> Actually I think that early indoctrination would (from the collected
> evidence presented here certainly, cf. Scott, myself and Kate) be the
> best way to prevent them looking to the church in later life :)
>
> Hippies breed lawyers, lawyers breed hippies.
>
> Now there's another one that could be programmed into a meme machine:
> Why is it that we absorb memes willy-nilly up to a point without
> question, then (funnily enough around early puberty which is what makes
> me think this is a _biological_ control of a meme farm -- the kind of
> 'big lever' thing that genes can actually manage) we suddenly reject a
> lot of stuff and start to 'think' (i.e. recombine memes, actively search
> for new memes to fill niches etc.)? We also become proprely empathic
> around that time (at least on average), which suggests more
> sophisticated internal ~memetic structures (cf. previous posts of mine
> on autism -- _not_ using the machinery to support the modelling of
> people (making true empathy impossible) frees up an enormous amount of
> compute power making them appear to excel in other ways).
>
> I'd argue that in early puberty, the hormonal changes that cause hair to
> sprout etc. also turn what was a 'low-connectivity' environment where
> memes just sit around together in the mind more or less unmolested (i.e.
> contradictions unresolved) into a 'high-connectivity' situation where
> memes can suddenly _severely_ impact each other; we attempt to build
> proper memeplexes resulting in niche competition, rejection, active
> search for new memes to fill gaps etc. Teen 'crazes' start around here.
>
> Note that I don't want to tie this to a particular age but it is
> somewhere from 7 to 14.
>
> This is why I want this to be a proper science: Clearly it is
> selected-for to be able to hold memes, clearly it is selected-for to be
> able to allow those memes to interact, compete and recombine (giving us
> our telencephalic powers to model and predict, and to deal with the
> novel by analogy). What we have is a system that just accumulates and
> accumulates up to a point; then when biology assumes that on average
> we'd have a good old sack of the things (and historically when we would
> have reached proto-adulthood, cue Keith) the mode of operation of the
> environment our brain provides for these things to live in _radically_
> changes.
>
> There is a similar biological/behavioural switch, that operates much
> earlier; at about age two suddenly things start to taste nasty whereas
> previously babies would eat almost anything (brussel sprouts!); this is
> because biology assumes that the kid will suddenly be more mobile and
> able to stuff a much wider range of dodgy stuff into its mouth without
> parental intervention, with the attendent increased risk of poisoning...
>
> We have evolved to let memes run our lives, our genes trust them to keep
> them in the gene pool. It is so much more than backwards baseball caps
> and ad jingles. This is us -- we are made of memes -- the life of the
> mind _is_ the mind and the brain is built to house and control their
> environment, just like so many macro-organisms house and manage
> microbial symbionts (but who has the whip hand I wonder).
>
> Cheers, Chris.
>
>
> Price, Ilfryn wrote:
>
>> I hope your advice includes not force feeding the kids religion before
>> the age of say 6 so that they are free to make their own
>> choices later rather than programmed.
>>
>> If
>>
>>
>>> Oh, suspicious one. Book two is "Gifted Children: A Guide for Parents
>>
>>
>> and Professionals" (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, April 2006). And thank
>> you. I've been wondering how with a clear conscience I could get a plug
>> in on such a completely irrelevant list.
>>
>> Ok, maybe not a *totally* clear conscience.
>>
>> Kate>
>>
>> ===============================================================
>> 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 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 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
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