An anatomy of the idea

Liv­ing day to day we some­times for­get the sig­nif­i­cance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a con­sid­er­able num­ber of neu­rons with sig­nif­i­cantly more con­nec­tions. Odd as it may sound, there is noth­ing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is there­fore puzzling.

Of course as sci­ence has pro­gressed the ques­tions have been framed dif­fer­ently. The way in which the ques­tions have been framed has become and index for under­stand­ing how we relate to mean­ing in the world; under­stand­ing thought and the rela­tion­ships ideas have to each other is impor­tant if we want to under­stand how we relate to our cul­tural envi­ron­ment. Know­ing how our brains work will help us to frame our­selves in the con­cep­tual world of memes and archetypes.

A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our expe­ri­ences bear lit­tle resem­blance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as con­science. For all intents and pur­poses we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The ques­tion is how? A lot of work has gone into try­ing to explain ‘how mat­ter becomes imag­i­na­tion’ (to bor­row a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).

To start to under­stand we must return to when we are awake; there is dis­tri­b­u­tion of activ­ity going on in our heads. Mem­o­ries encoded across regions of the brain are acti­vated, not just to explic­itly remem­ber some­thing, but to relate what we hear to the bank of infor­ma­tion already encoded in our brains. Those seman­tic net­works that become active rec­i­p­ro­cally influ­ence the way in which we encode the envi­ron­ment, we thus fur­ther per­ceive the world and our rela­tion to it in rela­tion to the meme­ories already banked up in our brains.

Prim­ing offers a rather good illus­tra­tion. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syl­la­bles and asked to com­plete them we are more likely to com­plete the syl­la­bles as the words that were in the list we stud­ied. On a seman­tic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doc­tor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘tele­phone’, why, because they are seman­ti­cally related. Sim­i­larly, researchers have found that ‘prim­ing’ peo­ple with aggres­sively related stim­uli will get peo­ple to inter­pret oth­ers behav­ior dur­ing com­pet­i­tive games as more aggres­sive and will sim­i­larly trig­ger a more aggres­sive response than one would oth­er­wise have seen.

One other impor­tant things about sleep­ing is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse infor­ma­tion that was impor­tant dur­ing the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same seman­tic net­works that are active dur­ing the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather sim­ple account. But it’s the prin­ci­ple that’s impor­tant. The prin­ci­ple is that the world that we expe­ri­ence is related to active con­stel­la­tions of infor­ma­tion in our brains, formed by the activ­ity between neu­rons that struc­ture and encode that infor­ma­tion. That activ­ity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our expe­ri­ences, which fur­ther influ­ences the world that influ­ences us.

As human beings, as minds a sig­nif­i­cant part of that activ­ity is ideational. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our expe­ri­ence is formed through ideas, con­cepts and seman­tic activ­ity. Things mean things (if I am per­mit­ted a circularity).

And that is the sig­nif­i­cance of mean­ing. The mean­ing we find in things dri­ves us. We relate to mean­ing of things. Jung in his book The Sci­ence of Mythol­ogy drew this point out (albeit psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cally), and if we think of the way in which we use rep­re­sen­ta­tional medi­ums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the sig­nif­i­cance of a Brand in the mod­ern world, we come close to under­stand­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.

The con­cept of a schema is impor­tant in under­stand­ing the same point. Schema, or pat­terns that rep­re­sent some part of the world don’t come in-​​built like the abil­ity to rec­og­nize faces (or like the struc­tures that con­tain the schemata). The con­cept of the arche­type is of this form as is the con­cept of the meme. They share enough sim­i­lar­i­ties to be syn­onyms for each other. That is they are both ref­er­ents for ideas.

Com­bin­ing all of the ele­ments in this pic­ture we can begin to form an under­stand­ing of our rela­tion­ship with the world of ideas. Ideas, rep­re­sented often as objects, have sig­nif­i­cance by virtue of our rela­tion to them. The rela­tion­ship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in soci­ety act as ref­er­ents, pro­vid­ing the envi­ron­ment with a sense of sig­nif­i­cance. That sig­nif­i­cance dri­ves our rela­tion­ship with our envi­ron­ment: press­ing for­ward en-​​mass the devel­op­ment of ideas con­tained in that envi­ron­ment shape a she­matic of ideational con­tent press­ing us with mean­ing. Thank­fully this is a par­tial pic­ture. One I hope devel­ops the impor­tance of ideas in the world as fac­tors in our rela­tion­ship with it. One that can help us bet­ter con­cep­tu­al­ize why some ideas work and some don’t as we cre­ativ­ity develop an image of the world we’re in.