At a workshop of Jerry Ruhl's recently, I learned about what brain researchers and scientists call "neural networks." (Since anything worth talking about alludes to the internet, you say "neural nets.")
Basically, neural nets exist because brains are very busy. And since they're so very busy, they take shortcuts to get from one place to another whenever they can.
So if you've done something, or felt something, or thought something, or heard something one time, you're very liable to experience it in exactly the same way the next time it comes up. Because you already have a pattern -- or a neural network -- for it in your brain.
And the more times you go over that thought or feeling, the deeper that neural network will get. There are places in Eastern Oregon where you can still see wagon ruts made by settlers back in the 1800s. That is what happens in the brain when we go over and over something. Think Rush Limbaugh. Think anyone who says the same type of thing over and over, with as much emotion as possible, whether it applies to the situation they're in or not. By that time, is it a neural net, or a wagon rut?
While this phenomenon is not exactly new -- Carl Jung first started talking about it almost 100 years ago, but he called them "complexes": sets of emotions attached to a fragment of your history, which are charged with feeling and energy, and are autonomous, which means they come up on their own -- it is getting more terrifying all the time.
Terrifying because we live in a world with thousands of highly effective ways to communicate, but a world where people do not tend to think about what they're saying. A world where most just say whatever pops into their heads first, or whatever they've heard someone else saying, with no reflection whatsoever. A world where many people actually make their living saying whatever pops into their heads first, to as many people as possible, and as hatefully as they can. (Sorry to pick on you here again, Rush. But you do make a juicy target.)
Folks, this is not good. As we all know, as we've been told repeatedly by every sage who ever walked the earth, minds need calming, not inflaming. Unless we're at the saint or Buddha stage, a good 80% of "whatever pops into our heads first" is going to be feeling-toned, overly emotional bullshit, capable of doing great damage to others. Not wisdom, not information, just complex. Knee-jerk, reactionary, monkey-mind babble.
Which we now pass around to one another faster than the world's worst virus.
Truly terrifying.
