Mind Viruses
What is a Mind Virus?
First we should understand what a virus is. A virus (the kind that affects the human body) is really little more than a polysaccharide case full of little bits of DNA or RNA. These bits of DNA or RNA are instructions (kind of like a computer virus) that get integrated into a cell and cause that cell to begin churning out copies of the virus that delivered the instructions to the cell in the first place. Typically the cell dedicates it’s entire existence to replicating these viruses until it has used up its capacity and then bursts releasing the new viruses into the body to deliver the same set of instructions to other cells in the body.
Mind Virus is an idea that behaves in a society the same way that a virus behaves in a human (or animal) body.
As Scott Bidstrup puts it in his essay “The Mind Virus”
“[They are all around us. Political or sexual jokes, for example, behave like viruses.] They start with one person, are retold time and again, and end up travelling around the world, as they’re told and retold, and in so doing, they behave like viruses. They infect (the joke is told to the ‘host’), they reproduce (are retold by the ‘host’ where they ‘infect’ new ‘hosts,’ etc.), they mutate (are told in variations that arise in the retelling), and they can even have vectors (books and magazines, or this web page, for example).
Like viruses, mind viruses can be harmless like many physical viruses, or they can be pathological, producing illness, just as do many physical viruses. Like physical viruses, they can be only modestly infective, or they can be highly virulent. They can control behavior, just as physical viruses can, and they can even direct physical evolution, as explained by the recent article on them in Scientific American (see The Power of Memes, by Susan Blackmore in the October 2000 issue, page 64). The whole range of behaviors that are seen in physical viruses can be seen to have analogies in memes.”
Many people are familiar with the game “Chinese Whispers” where you get a group of people together and one person decides upon a phrase to pass, and whispers that phrase into the person’s ear next to them. That person turns around and whispers what they think they heard to the person next to them until the message makes it’s way through the group. Then the last person in the chain says aloud the message they think they heard and more often than not it is very different from the original message.
Why then is it that if a room of 8 people can’t keep a simple phrase from getting corrupted that a knock knock joke can be known by nearly everyone on the planet? The answer is that the phrase was not really a viable virus. It was missing important pieces necessary to keep itself from being corrupted during transmission. A Joke for example has a punch line. So a person needs to remember how to set the joke up for the punch line in order to be able to successfully deliver the joke, if they don’t then the joke gets no laugh and the person has to go back and try to “pick up” the virus once again until it is able to get a laugh at which point the person has been properly infected.
This section of the site is dedicated to storing away valuable information that due to it’s nature deserves replication. This area intends to provide a host to enable these mind viruses to lay dormant and accessible to the open mind that they may proliferate and benefit their hosts.