Memes and mirror neurons: WTF does this have to do with Webstock?

Meme theory is the idea that every single piece of information in the world is created by a process of natural selection and evolution. Most people accept this for biological things as it is easy to see how mutations in genes can be selected for their ability to pass on copies of themselves; but it is a conceptual leap to see how cars and words and culture and even passing a rugby ball are all created by the same process of natural selection and evolution.

The reasons memes maybe harder to accept is that unlike genes, we have absolutely no idea what they are, which we will come back to shortly.

Let’s have a look at the example of a cup. The first cup ever was most likely created by accident: maybe it was a piece of bark or wood, roughly cup shape. One of your ancestors may have stumbled across it, next to a cold mountain stream in the middle of winter and not wanting to get cold hands they picked up the rudimentary cup and used it to drink from.

This ancestor showed this “cup” to others, who showed others, who eventually began to fashion cups out of wood and at this point you have memetic evolution.

The process of building cups is the meme.

Living in an extended family group, way back in our distant past, it would make sense to learn to make cups from the person who made the best cups. The process of making cups is then selected as it is passed down generations for the ability to make the best cups.

Given enough time the cup meme mutates and diverges into new niches such as cups to hold cold water or cups to hold hot water and new processes are used to make cups out of clay, or metal or glass. Each process for making cups is passed down from one person to another and selected for making the best cup for the job.

So what does this have to do with Webstock?

Kathy Sierra mentioned mirror neurons in her presentation to Webstock saying mirror neurons fire when humans are observing behavior in other humans. So when you watch someone jumping, their neurons are firing to tell the body to jump, but your mirror neurons also fire, in a similar pattern as your brain mimics the behavior of the person you are looking at.

Mirror neurons would also fire when observing the cup making process and the order and shape of the neurons that fire are the memes for that cup.

This was all part of her important distinction between the mind and the brain and to build good websites you need to make sure you are aware of the differences between the two and are catering to both.