The mental virus: An idea worth having

College

College of Liberal Arts

Department/Unit

Psychology

Document Type

Archival Material/Manuscript

Abstract

If the human mind can be correctly characterized as a kind of computational system, it would not be unreasonable to ask whether it is possible that there exist the psychological analogues of computer viruses. A similar line of reasoning can be seen when Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme (1989) as the social-epistemological parallel of his ideas about genes as the primary agents of biological evolution, and he has talked about this in terms which consciously borrow from the language of the biology of viruses (e.g. infection, epidemiology, replicators). However, neither Dawkins nor other supporters of this idea explore the extension of this metaphor to cognitive psychology (as opposed to cultural evolution). This paper examines the scientific utility of the metaphor “mental virus” in psychology, and surveys phenomena which are possible token instances of this concept, such as schizophrenic delusions, supernormal stimuli, and archetypal narratives. Key to the hypothesized workings of the mental virus is analogical processes, and an exemplar computational model in the form of the LISA architecture is used to illustrate.

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Disciplines

Cognition and Perception | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Cognition; Cognition disorders; Cognitive psychology

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