Bonus Sample: Digital Delusions: How conspiracy-fueled political religions like QAnon hijack our brains
QAnon emerged out of a perfect storm of evolving technology, social psychology, and global crisis. But it exploited pre-existing neural architecture already easily hijacked by addictive drugs, junk food, porn, persuasive marketing, and cultish religions. It also relied on how mobile social media, running on cellular and wifi technology, amplifies and speeds up the algorithmic impact of hyper-contagious cultural memes on the material world. Maybe 5G was the real threat all along?Julian explores our conspiritualist tendencies toward patternicity and apophenia, which can be super-stimulated by well-adapted memes, complex puzzles, and grandiose in-group purpose—and suggests a possible antidote.
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
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We're all familiar with the feeling of epiphany.
When the solution to a problem suddenly pops into your head or a deeper perspective illuminates an intractable situation.
The stories of Newton's realization when the apple supposedly fell on his head about the solution to his puzzling over gravity or Archimedes crying out Eureka when hitting upon a key mathematical principle come to mind.
The concept of an epiphany did originally have a supernatural connotation, much like the way a lot of spiritual people today think about intuition or the repurposed concept of downloads, as if something so outside of our everyday rational thought process and mundane knowledge base has dropped the relevant information into our minds.
Part of this epiphanic quality is a resonant emotional sense that this new thought simply must be true.
There is likely a good neurochemical explanation for this, probably via dopamine, but without that effect, All you would have would be another thought or a solution that emerged by predictable and familiar means.
Epiphanies feel special.
They feel good, meaningful.
They drive us forward as we anticipate the next pleasurable discovery or application of this new insight.
As with accurately interpreted patterns like the paw prints left by an animal or the harvest season beginning when the moon rose in a particular constellation versus more patternistic beliefs that say sacrificing a goat could make the harvest plentiful, so too there's a distinction here between regular epiphanies and the type of epiphany referred to as an apophenia.
Which is defined as the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between things that actually are unrelated.
The prevalence of epiphanies in one's thought process is probably familiar to you in the new age focus on faux profound synchronicities everywhere and things like the time magically being 1111 at least twice a day and other supposedly auspicious and usually harmless numeric or astrological claims.
These of course also represent patternicity.
So an apophenia would be some kind of seeming epiphany about what these patterns mean.
And then going along in the rest of your life as if you have discovered some key spiritual truth about the universe.
Pushed a little further along this spectrum, apophenia can also be an early sign of psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia.
And it's also associated with the style of weaving together coincidences to create a plot that is common to many conspiracy theories.
Memes and mirror neurons. - In my favorite of his TED Talks, Professor Ramachandran reflects on how mirror neurons, which allow us to both mimic and empathize in a broad sense with others, may have shaped what we think of as civilization.
Mirror neurons create a kind of simulation in the brain of what we are seeing someone else do, be it a facial expression, a dance move, or a way of flipping pancakes.
While touch mirror neurons simulate for us internally what we imagine someone else's sensate experience to be like.
These could play a role in empathy.
He speculates that by utilizing mirror neurons, these specialized brain cells, human culture enacts a kind of very rapid evolution in that we can pass on learned experience exponentially more quickly than ordinary evolutionary processes would allow.
Now Rama, as he likes to be called, uses the example of a bear who would have taken many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to stand before you with his impressive coat of fur in a cold landscape, but that a young human could watch their parent kill and skin that bear to wear its fur and stay warm in perhaps one or two days and then carry that advantageous skill with them throughout their lives and teach it to others.
Now this makes me picture a kind of abstract layer of cognitive learning and communication that sort of floats above, but of course is also emergent from, biological evolution.
It floats above, in a way, the material world, right?
So this may sound like I'm becoming a dualist, but I'm not.
I'm saying there is this abstract domain that lives sort of inside of us.
that is able to exert influence on the world outside of our minds in ways that I think we're discovering is much more powerful than we ever imagined.
Now, obviously, the ability to kill and skin a bear, and my apologies for the brutal example, is not directly inherited by the next generation of humans.
It's not passed along by the genes.
But it becomes a cultural artifact that continues down the generations just like cooking or rites of passage or gender roles or attitudes towards outsiders or the region's specific language or religious mythology.
All of those cultural flavors are unique to groups of people, but share the same receptor sites, so to speak, or underlying brain architecture and genetic mechanisms in all human beings.
But what happens when this abstract cultural process grows in power and influence beyond what our ancestors could have imagined?
I mentioned Dan Dennett's intentional stance.
That's our innate mental tendency to ascribe agency to phenomena and there is an overlap here with something we all do with one another and indeed with our pets too.
We have operating within our brains something cognitive psychologists call a theory of mind.
Meaning we have a constantly updating sort of interpretation of what is going on inside the minds of others.
Even though, regardless of the claims of psychics, we don't have direct access to other minds, we're able to speculate based on our own experience of, well, experience, as well as cues that we pick up from others like body language, tone of voice, and facial expression.
Mirror neurons are involved here too, as they create real-time simulations of cues like facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, to imagine the internal state and intentions of those around us.
Now obviously this allows for safety from dangerous people and for bonding and empathy with those we trust.
Listen in on the conversation at any dog park and you'll also hear dog owners enjoying the spontaneous putting into words of what we imagine our dogs are thinking, wanting and feeling as we watch them interact with one another.
That's theory of mind.
Notice what happens when we remove most or all of those non-verbal cues from an interaction.
Think of a time when you confronted the now-cliche realization that we often incorrectly add tone and emotional context to an email that was not intended or indeed felt that way by the writer.
