Viruses of the Mind

How our brains can be hacked by enviornmental stimuli

This is the scientific essay. Totally based on the concept of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Philosophy, Morality, Religion, Mystics or any other realms cannot explain what makes us human . Only biology can describe this correctly. Biology can answer philosophy's most profound questions with physics (quantum, classical, and astro). Very soon, biology will replace philosophy, or it almost has.

On a fine morning, at around 11 a.m., down the street, I was walking. It was not a rush hour. I saw a boy coming in front, probably of the same age as mine, with Tilak (a vertical mark on forehead Hindus put with red powder) on his forehead, walking with arms stretched like he considered himself a bodybuilder, though he was not. Another teenager of the same age was coming behind him; he was driving a two-wheeler. And then, due to a turn on the road, the boy slowed down his vehicle, as in front of him was the Iron man(we will call our protagonist as iron man now on) going. But unfortunately, his clutch slightly touched his elbow. And as soon as iron man got touched, he lifted his right hand up, as we do when we try to slap someone. He was just about to give a slap to the motor driver. After that hand action, local people came immediately and solved the matter. But that one-second action of the iron man caught my attention. In my view, he could have abused a little bit or stared at that vehicle boy; raising hand to fight directly is unnecessary and an exaggerated action.

In the rest of the essay, we will dive into the details of that one-second action. We will break that action into biological systems. What could have caused it? There are several forces which are at work on the primates and other beings all the time. But the first big basic fact you have to swallow is that “you have no free will whatsoever". All your actions are influenced by your genes, hormones, prenatal life, your mother's hormone level at the time you were marinated as an egg, your socio-economic status, your parent's house environment, what you see, your biases, beliefs, and language. How you perceive anything, the world, or an action is colored by your emotions, knowledge, and beliefs. The brain is heavily influenced by genes, but from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines itself is less a product of the genes with which we started life than of what life has thrown at you. The frontal cortex, which is responsible for the performance of motor tasks, judgment, abstract thinking, creativity, and maintaining social appropriateness, is the last developing region in the brain, fully grown at 30. The frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience.

For our analysis, we will not go into the pathology of our boy. We will mostly see how environmental things affect us. Let’s see what we know about our man: his age is between 20 and 24 and he is an adolescent; he gets angry; he is religious (Tilak); he has a mobile device (assuming he also has access to the internet); he has good body shape; maybe he goes to the gym. To actually understand living beings, we have to go back 4.5 billion years, when the first single cell formed. But as we are not going to look into the inside of the body, we will maximum go back to 4,50000 years, when the first/early human came into existence, Homo-Bodoensis.

If you do not believe in the Darwin theory of evolution, which is now a scientifically proven fact, and you believe god created the universe and there is an intelligent designer at work, I am sorry, but you are a conformist and idiot. As E.O. Wilson has said, “People would rather believe than know." I would recommend you read ‘Origin of the Species’ by Darwin or, for light reading, read ‘What is Life’ by Lynn Margulis. We are not going to waste any amount of time on the soul, god, philosophy, or any vedic-mystic, non-sensical bullshit. I used the small ‘g’ in god intentionally. ‘god’ is not great. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian priest, listed three things that god could not do. The first two are just theological stuff, but the third statement is just earth shaking.

1.      God cannot commit sin.

2.      God cannot make copies of himself.

3.      Even god cannot make a triangle with more than 180 degrees.

In that one concept Aquinas had just said; if it comes up against sort of old knowledge and science, science wins. Having said that any mystic alive or dead cannot explain what makes us human, what is the biology behind the behavior we perform. Only science can explain these profound questions.

American astronomer and planetary scientist, Dr Carl Sagan described ‘Science vs Ignorance’, very precisely-

“We have arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it”.

Let's come to the topic and see the first most effective object our man has: ‘Mobile’-

Mobile is the most important gadget we all use in our daily lives; it can shape our behavior in ways so subtle that we can’t even imagine. A mobile phone with the internet is the best game-changing, knowledge-gaining device we have at our disposal, if it is used efficiently. The problem is that we rarely ask WH questions on Google. But we spend most of our time seeing what other people are doing on social media. The most damaging apps I find are Instagram and Snapchat. Mobile phones are also damaging if they are used by people under the age of 14. But that is a separate sociology topic. For our purpose, we will see how these apps are so addictive in the biological realm.

Gen Z thinks mobile is their fundamental right. They don’t acknowledge the 70+ years of labor people did to make this device. It not only cost between 7000 to 200000 INR(between 100$ to 1000$) but it also cost two generations of sacrifice and labor to make it. So use it constructively. Let's come back to Instagram. It has a cool feature called ‘Reel'—a 15-second to 1-minute short video format. When many governments started banning TikTok in June 2020, the reel feature came onto Instagram. There are N categories of reels: food reels, travel reels, product reels, mafiya/gangster-type reels, people doing acting, dancing, makeup, etc., but the worrying things about reels are:

1.      It comes in your feed as per your earlier reel view category. So, for example, if I regularly see cat videos, 6 out of 10 videos in my feed will be of cat stuff. You may end up seeing different feeds in your account totally based on the past days reels you have watched; you may never see a single cat video in your feed; and I may end up not seeing a single PUBG gaming reel. So having said that, everyone is living in their own, created, different algorithmic world.

2.      Reels are endless. If you watch it for the whole day, still it will not end at any point; every time you scroll, you will see a new reel. Totally exhausting!

3.      The same thing goes with Snapchat: in order to use the app daily, SnapChat introduced the Streak feature. Here, you set up a connection with a friend, and you have to exchange photos and videos daily in order to keep streaks. One day you miss, and the streak breaks. Suppose you were exchanging photos for 60 days regularly; your streak is 60. But on the 61st day, you missed, and the streak ended at 0. People take it as a personal loss, feeling so much despair. It is directly related to the religious numerology thing that we believe in, an OCD. Which we will talk about in the Religion section in detail.

What do we understand by the word 'reel'? That definition of the fake world of cinema, the reel-life hero, and action got old. In the course of technological development, reel becomes much more immersive; we can live in reel life 24/7. We create an aura around ourselves, which originally we are not, but what we represent ourselves on social media and how we want people to perceive us. We can understand this point more clearly with the below short story by Jorge Luis Borges:

A long time ago, there was a vast empire. The king called the cartographer to make the map of the nation. The cartographer took years and made a very precise map. King was happy. But those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied the cartographer; he asked the king to give him more time to make them more precise, as there were a few things missing in the map, like seasons changing, crops, flooding, trees falling, etc. King said it is already a good one, but if you still want to make it go, do it. The cartographer hired a few people to make the map; they made the map to the size of the empire, which coincided with point-to-point. But again, as the map gets completed, something could have changed in reality. Slowly, all of the people of the nation immerse themselves in making the map of the nation. So gradually, the map overtakes reality, and people start to live in the map itself rather than in reality. The meaning is that they started living according to the map. In the end, the map replaces the kingdom.

The same thing is happening with reels and other such things. People use it, and as time passes, people start to behave according to what they have watched on those platforms (Mirror neurons- VS Ramchandran). In this scenario, we can call it Instagram reels replacing reality. We are living into our own virtual algorithms, which are becoming a reality and an integral part of our behavior. So everyone in their own virtual world is a priest, a fashion model, or a mafiya. One of my friends daily uploads a 15-second ‘Aarti’(a hindu ritual- daily worshipping god with flower and candle) video on Whatsapp with one flower and one heart emoji. He does ‘Aarti’ on the WhatsApp status. This is sort of a new-age OCD.

Lets see the thought experiment by Nobel Laurette Daniel Kahneman- Remembering self vs Experiencing self.

According to Kahneman, we have two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self knows only the present moment. The remembering self is a storyteller (“that was a good hike”; “that was a bad flight”), and it can dictate our actions when we think of the future as an anticipated memory (“that will be a fun trip”).

Experiment- Imagine you are planning a perfect vacation. Where would you go? Select a place. What outfits would you bring? Select your dresses and sneakers. What type of camera/filter would you use?  Which accommodations and restaurants would you choose? Will it be a cheap hotel or dormitory?

…………..

All these things you imagined? Now, what if at the end of your glorious vacation, you were told to have your memory erased and all your pictures and memorabilia confiscated. Would you pick the same vacation place?

It's a very intriguing question that raises the notion of a dual self: the self that lives in the present moment, and self that is obscured in memory or imagination. So are we capturing memories or are we purposefully designing them? There’s talk of the ‘Instagram Generation,’ those born after 1990 who, in posting perfectly posed pictures with the right amount of nostalgic filtering, are in fact architects of their future memories. It seems that even as we plan something, we are simultaneously anticipating the memories we expect to get out of it. Whether it’s polaroids from the 70s or social media today, the way we choose to capture memories is in line with how our sense of self fits into the spectrum of present, past and future. That is happening with the social media. We are not real ‘we’ on platforms as who we are in real. 

But why are we so addicted to reels? For short answer we can see Biologist E.O Wilson quote- “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” Long answer lies in the brain. A neurotransmitter called- “Dopamine”.

Before going into dopamine, let's ask the very basic question: What is happiness and suffering? In order to survive in a wild nature or forest, all living beings evolved a reward- or punishment-providing mechanism. Happiness and suffering are nothing but the release of neurotransmitters in the brain. If we do something good, eat sweets, and survive any causalities, our body rewards us through its reward mechanism circuits. The same goes with suffering; it is an alarm system that the brain sends to get away from danger. Suppose you have put your finger on a candle. You immediately get a signal to remove the hand from the danger. It involves all your brain functions, from touch sensing to the motor cortex; it also activates the amygdala, which is related to fear and anxiety. A number of the processing happens in that very 1 second. And this mesolimbic reward/alarm system is the same in every mammal.

There are different neurotransmitters that releases in happiness and suffering. In the last three centuries philosophers, mystics, religious leaders tried to make point that happiness and suffering is something that human create by themselves. And that is a massive fallacy- this is the way we have evolved. Happiness and suffering are inevitable.

What is the use of dopamine? Dopamine is one of the main neurotransmitters, also called the feel-good hormone. But in actuality, it is more than that. It is the hormone that gets you going; it is for motivation and novelty-seeking. Depressed people have a very low level of dopamine, which is why they feel unmotivated. Even not going to get a glass of water, this is called anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure. Every stimulus—drugs, sex, porn, food—activates the same reward circuitry. Sex releases dopamine in every species examined. For humans, just thinking about sex suffices. There are various other variations in this; dopaminergic responses to sexually arousing visual stimuli are greater in men than in women. Fun fact: this difference is not specific to humans only; male Rhesus monkeys will forgo the chance of drinking water when thirsty in order to see the pictures of female Rhesus monkeys.

Thus, dopamine is about rapidly habituating rewards. But dopamine is more interesting than that. It is more about anticipation. If you noticed, when you are hungry, you get so excited for the food. That anticipation of the food itself is the reward, and that reward is greater than the reward you get when dopamine releases when you intake the food. Anticipation has ended; you have the food now; you have achieved the goal. Now find another thing to pursue: novelty. There is not much joy left in the food now.

We can understand it from the rat experiment: There are rats working for rewards. A light comes on in his room, signaling the start of a reward trial. He goes over to the lever, presses ten times, and always gets the raisin reward; this happened many times enough that there is only a small increase in dopamine with each raisin. No Novelty.

But importantly lots of dopamine is released when the light first comes on, signaling the start of the reward trial, before the monkey starts lever pressing. So in summary we can say when the reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than its anticipation.

Now setting of the experiment is changed, instead of pressing the lever 10 times- light comes in rat presses the lever only once- there may be reward and there may be not. 50 percent chance. This new scenario fuels up the dopamine because there is “maybe”, rollercoaster. In the earlier setting dopamine surges most when the light comes in, but in this setting dopamine surges most after pressing the lever because there maybe yes and maybe not reward scenario.

Now you may have got the point: Am I saying we are all rats? No. But how we are working and our behavior are the same as those of rats because we all have the same ancient brain wiring and reward mechanisms. Scrolling reels one by one is almost the same as a rat pressing the lever. You are looking for novelty, something new, type of reel; different type of reel that you have already watched, so you can touch the new high of dopamine. That is your reward. From a neurobiology perspective, this is the reason we are addicted to these stimuli; Instagram is just one example I have used. The same mechanism can explain our behaviors to other similar stimulas.

Maybe our protagonist was indulged in Pseudo-Insta-Mafiya types reel. By seeing that he may consider himself as mafiya or badass in real life. Badass reel type map transcended in his real life.

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Now lets see what our protagonist have second thing at his disposal-His stretched arms- Showcasing muscle strength- Gym and other stimulas.

There are forces acting upon every one of us constantly. There are erosion, gravity, centripetal force, and radiation—life disperses on this planet; death is inevitable, but somehow we have managed to stay on the planet for 4.5 billion years. How? By making more copies of ourselves by having progeny, chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. We have discussed happiness and suffering earlier, and we can conclude from there that these two attributes can be easily hacked. If there are any stimuli that push your body to generate either of these two emotions, you are hacked. We can understand this point from the below experiments.

In 1955, ethologist Nikolas Tinbergen did a remarkable experiment. He asked a simple question: How do any offspring of the species know or recognize who their parents are? He conducted his research on Herring Gull chicks. His hypothesis was that there are innate, unique biological markers in each of us. We have a unique fingerprint, and that is how any child/spiece recognizes each other. Herring gulls have a yellow beak, and there is a red dot on that beak. According to Tinbergen, this was their fingerprint—a red dot. As nature is resource-conservative, a newborn child cannot and should not process his whole surroundings to find his parents. Only a marker is enough; there are other things their body needs. The remaining energy body will utilize to develop itself. There are biological markers that everyone looks for. It is resource-saving.

So what Tinbergen did was that he took only a beak of the dead herring gull and showed it to chicks when they came out. They started pecking at that beak for food, as they did to their mother earlier. There was no change in behavior. Then he made the beak using cardboard and marked the red dot on it. The same behavior was shown by chicks with the same energy. It doesn’t matter if it is an alive mother, a dead bird beak, or the same model beak made with cardboard. Now Tinbergen made the larger red dot compared to the previous one. Chicks went bizzare with excitement; they were pecking at cardboard with far greater rigor. Same experiment he did with fish. Chicks were also pecking, but with less excitement when the color of the dot was not red. So. there is an association with color as well. And that is the key point.

There are different types of stimuli that we respond to. Let's see our next example to understand the point more clearly: there is a bird called the Barn Swallow. It has a beautiful bright blue feather and a black feather at the neck, and the rest has white or yellow fur. A female barn swallow will only mate with a male barn swallow whose chest is perfect in color. A bright black or yellow color (depending upon which continent we are talking about). Why? This is because, due to evolution, females will only choose males whom they think are healthy enough to bear the child and provide food and security. But again, these are not the attributes that females search for intentionally; these are the innate qualities every species has gathered through adaptation with respect to the environment. Richard Dawkins called it "the selfish gene”. So all those pale-chested male barn swallows will be rejected who do not have mating markers as per standard—a bright color on the chest. Now suppose you are a smart barn swallow. You get the idea that a single tip marker can also do the same thing. You just color your chest, and you are ready to be selected as a healthy male.

That is the whole cosmetic industry people have created. 1 rupee tip marker idea. This is what we do when we make plastic trees, make plastic LED Diyas, LED candles, perfumes, etc., and other synthetic stimuli. But the problem with the duplicate items is that five times these stimuli fool us, as we think they are the original, but after a few encounters, we learned that, No, this is the plastic tree. This is the Diyas made with LED. And we start losing interest in that. This is called cry-wolf syndrome. A boy makes a fool of people by crying, "Help, there is a wolf,” but as people arrive at the spot, he laughs and says, “I made a fool of you. There is no wolf. Go back”. But how many times can he fool people? When our ancestors lived in forests, they could not have seen as many beautiful women and men in their whole lifetime as we see in 5 minutes on the internet. At that point, leaving copies of your genes was far more important than any other task. But now that we are 7 billion in number, reproduction is not the most urgent thing to do. Hunter gatherers in Forest and Savanna used to run; that’s how they kept themselves fit. To represent themselves as healthy to be chosen by females. At present, we are not hunter-gatherers; we don’t run as much as they did for food. So to keep fit and be selected for the mating line, we started going to the gym. To show ourselves as strong, healthy, and fit for reproduction. PS: Everyone should go to the gym; it is very necessary for your health. But we give very much attention to the physical gym and body and six pack and bicep, and that is where the problem starts; that’s where we fall back into the hunter-gatherer domain; that’s where our mind is hacked by simple stimuli; that’s where we set our goal to find a partner to mate. We should give more attention to the cognitive gym rather than: learn new things, be a seeker, play games, make something, drop the ignorance and chase the things that are going to be useful for civilizations, search for breakthroughs, make a thinking toolbox, and proliferate what you have gained if it is useful. Observe.

Now we come to the last chareacterstic of our man- He is religious.

We will discuss ‘Religion’ topic in detail in the the next substack.

Part 2-

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