Cause: Cultural Memes & Mutations

1. Liane Gabora's (1998) target article is a systematic attempt to draw together knowledge from different fields to answer the question of the origin of culture, offering some important suggestions. Several elements in Gabora's article draw upon the most recent discoveries in neuroscience. I will now dwell on one particular point which has especially significant implications.

2. According to Gabora, the origin of culture may be defined as "the bootstrapping of a system by which information patterns self-replicate, (leading to) the selective proliferation of some variants of these self-replicating patterns over others." In this context the term "meme" is used to refer to a unit of cultural information as represented in the brain.

3. It is evident that each meme must coincide with the set of neurons which expresses it. In Gabora's paper, the mind is described as a structure used to filter the flow of memes (i.e. of organized neuronal discharges) on the basis of internal and external cues able to activate these specific sets of neurons.

4. Gabora refers to "myths" about the origin of human culture (Donald, 1991), which hypothesize that "in the beginning" there existed a totally "episodic" mind, i.e. one able to manage only memories linked to immediate stimuli (not only environmental, but also bodily: hunger, thirst, etc.).

5. From this chaos of episodic (and therefore ephemeral) events was born a mind organized in such a manner as to allow it to evoke informational units (memes) even in the absence of external stimuli, it was able to have abstract thoughts, and therefore make associations on a second level (between actual stimuli and representations of stimuli; then between these and representations of the associations themselves, or even between these other stimuli or representations of stimuli, whether past or present).

6. The birth of this "memetic" mind is attributed to a genetic mutation, and it is hard to imagine that it could have arisen in any other way. Such a mutation would have modified the threshold of filtering of the association between information units. As a consequence, memes which would otherwise be filtered out of the operational memory (consciousness?) gain access to this sector of the mind, bringing into operation other memes in a cycle which can lead to creative (i.e. innovative) associations, but also to severe behavioural problems.

7. Gabora refers to neurobiological models of schizophrenia to illustrate the consequences of her hypothesis. Many hypotheses about schizophrenia indeed suggest that a deficit in the systems involved in information-processing could contribute to the symptomatology of the disorder (McGhie & Chapman, 1961; Hansefus & Magaro, 1976; Braff & Geyer, 1990; Cornblatt & Kellp, 1994). Such a deficit could be expressed in a severe behavioural disorder, but it could also favour creative associations between information units (Hansefus & Magaro, 1976; Preti & Miotto, 1997). Many studies have explored the propensity toward innovation and originality in people suffering from psychoses (Arieti, 1974; Preti & Miotto, 1997). This psychosis-linked creative ability is evident in the arts and in language, but is also seen in the sciences and even in extremely abstract disciplines such as mathematics (Hayes, 1998).

Read the full article here: Creativity, Genetics and Mental Illness