The Science of Meme Magic

Meme Magic has always had an art to it, but recent psychological research has revealed that maybe science has more of a hand in it than we think.

I’m going to be expanding a bit on the paper by Dr. Russell T. Hurlburt which is the basis for the NPC meme. Dr. Hurlburt is one of the recent pioneers in a topic of psychology called “Pristine Inner Experience”. In his own words, these “are thoughts, feelings, sensations, tickles, seeings, hearings, and so on, anything that appears directly before the footlights of consciousness”.

You can think of pristine inner experiences as being sheep in a flock. They really just wander around doing their own thing, until they are brought into check by the sheepdog of your conscious mind. That is essentially what they are, it is anything in your mind, your subconscious thoughts, feelings, everything that happens before or completely independently of your conscious thought. That is where the “pristine” comes in, they are untouched, uncorrupted, for lack of a better word, by your conscious self.

Like onions and ogres, there are five layers of inner experiences, each less “instinctual” and more in communication with your conscious mind. The first layer, the one that requires the highest brain function, is what the paper deals with, inner speech. The second layer is inner seeing, the third is feelings, next is basic sensory awareness, and right at the bottom there is the most basic yet near-incomprehensible, almost unquantifiable phenomenon of unsymbolized thoughts.

An important thing to note here, that I will be coming back to later, is that these five types of inner experience aren’t what form your conscious thoughts. Rather, they are variables in the algorithm your conscious mind uses in processing and decision making. They are not, as many supporters of the NPC theory state, a simple IPO, if-this-then-that circuit which governs major decisions.

What the inner speech research reinforced was that pristine inner experiences are not uniform across the population; different people rely to different degrees on each of the five inner experiences to make contributions to their conscious thought.

Now on to where the NPC meme came from. The research showing that the majority of people go through life with minimal contribution from inner speech is sort of a confirmation to what many people already thought. It reminds me of part of an XKCD comic; “glassy eyed automatons, never stopping to look around and think”. It proved that cognition can happen without cerebration.

I’m going to refer to people who do not rely on inner speech as NPCs from now on, but know I don’t mean it in the classical context. NPCs are not a sub-class of humans, they are not robots comparing interactions to a script.

The truth that does come out from the meme is that by lacking the highest order of their subconscious processes, NPCs do function reactively on a more instinctual level. Instinct is a necessary trait. “muscle memory” is probably the most well-known instances of this phenomenon. Driving a car or even typing would be functionally impossible if you had to consciously process and decide what to do with every stimulus. But just how people rely on muscle memory to let their fingers type what they want to say, so can they often let “muscle memory” take control of higher orders of functioning. As proof you can see this in yourself; you most likely use common “catchphrases” such as greetings or farewells, or common to everyone, exclamations. You don’t choose to say it, it is merely a reaction, a response that you have conditioned into yourself. By the time you are aware of what you are saying, you are half way through the phrase. If your immediate response to a spider dropping on you is anything but shouting and spastic waving, you have clearly never had a spider drop on you.

In such situations it is beneficial to not need to think “okay, a spider just dropped on me, what do I do now?”, or feel frightened at a hairy, venomous octopod in close proximity. The most beneficial reaction would be to have an immediate activation of your sympathetic nervous system, and, before you are even consciously aware that there is a spider in your lap, begin swatting it away.

Varying levels of instinct are needed for dealing with varying situations. The more complex a situation, the more layers of subconscious processing are required to feed your conscious mind adequate information.

This is the point I made earlier about the subconscious processing contributing to your conscious processing. As people rely on different levels of processing, different stimuli which have different levels of “pull” with different levels of consciousness will then be delivered differently to the conscious mind.

As an example, a particularly emotion-evoking image will play strongly on the primal, emotional thoughts, and feelings, but be tempered by the higher order less easily influenced inner seeing and inner speech. Someone with decreased contribution from inner speech or inner seeing would have relatively larger contributions from the other levels and would have a powerful emotional response. Conversely, someone with a relatively larger inner speech contribution, which would have a relatively weaker emotional response. Even if the lower levels of processing are identical, the presence of a string of processing which opposes them would decrease their efficacy.

There are many practical lessons that could be taken from this, but the first and foremost is that subconscious processing of information plays a large role in life, and when people are relying more on subconscious than conscious processing, it is easy to follow a common algorithm to create content which people will then internalize via a common algorithm.

A widely accepted cognitive bias is that there is a mental block against information which contradicts your known worldview, particularly if the information is presented in a manner which makes it obvious that the goal is to change your mind, or if the information strongly opposes an already-held belief. Humans are stubborn creatures, and rarely more so when it comes to our strongly held viewpoints.

The importance of knowledge of the pristine subconscious, and the variations thereof, is that it will allow the tailoring of different approaches which would, through convincing the subconscious processing, and thus allow the conscious mind to internalize the presented information.

Memes are particularly of note here. The very nature of the mental virus necessitates it starting as something easily internalized and benign. A humorous one-liner for instance. But then through its evolution, elements are added, slightly changing the nature of the meme. The most common understanding of memes, a picture with text, can easily have social or political messages added to it.

Such messages would very quickly be detected as “other” by the subconscious higher reasoning and earmarked to be ignored. Now if this message was to be incorporated onto a common and benign image which is usually accompanied by text, the pristine mind will recognize it, almost without regard to the variations, as known, and the message contained will then be more easily available for internalization.

So this is where the NPC meme has a certain truth to it. People who lack inner speech lack not the capacity for critical thought, but lack the propensity to engage critical thought subconsciously. People who lack inner speech have less of a logical filter between input and conscious processing, and are impacted more deeply by emotional stimuli. People who lack inner speech tend to exercise subconscious filters at a lower order of reasoning, and fortified against certain attempts to change their minds, but conversely more vulnerable to other methods.

As for real-world examples, and where it can be applied, I leave that to you.