Saturday, July 28, 2007

 

PATTERNING II

Patterning a system of prefabricated reactions, emotions to some stimuli

Mr. Friedman, columnist from New York Times, visited Arabic states and asked various questions about why Arabic people dislike Americans. He shot interview with a young Arabic lady and among other questions he asked these two: Why do you dislike Americans and where do you have you information from? And the second question was: What would you do if you were offered a study place in the USA?

Now the young woman got really upset when talking about Americans boxing people and nations around in the world, she showed she was happy that America got punch in the nose, she meant September 11, and she said her sources where TV, Internet and Arabic magazines.

One can conclude that most probably the majority of her sources came from Arabic TV, Arabic Internet and Arabic magazines, where mostly Americans are being constantly criticized for anything.

Reading certain type of information many times corresponds with the necessity to repeat in order to remember; and remembering means creating patterns. So the brain of the young Arabic woman created several patterns against Americans.

There is an old saying to this phenomenon: a hundred times repeated lie becomes the truth

On the other side when asked what she would do id offered a study place at one American university, the young woman said that USA is the top of knowledge and that it would be perfect and she would like to go there and study in the USA, and her face and eyes witnessed on her eagerness to go to the USA and study. Her words were not merely words. It was emotion.

It seems to me that the young woman is victim of her own patterns, as she is not capable of using logic, but only prefabricated patterns, emotions. Mostly all people use patterns more than logic. Patterns are produced by repetition of some stimuli and the same reaction. It is like learning words in a foreign language.

Unfortunately, this happens to vast majority of people, we are mostly pattern- and emotion-driven, than by pure thinking. Even our thinking is limited by our emotions and patterns.

 

Ethology

Forms of mating

Many years ago when I started to read something about mating in different animals I concluded that every animal has its own way of attracting the mating partner and we humans have them all.

Today I came across a blog where the author posts a video of mating spiders. Have a look, read and think. Here is the link to the other blog.

 

PATTERNING

Patterns are stored algorithms of responses we use in order not to lose too much time when responding to some stimuli

Again something that came through GOOGLE ALERTS and made me think a bit for a while. Author quotes some basic ideas of Tom Gieryn. I will pick up only two of his rules and will try to discuss them a bit. Here you can read the blog of the author.

First law says: People act differently
Second law says: All societies are unequal

I can fully agree with the second law, but I cannot fully agree with the first law. Humans are organized in groups, societies, and it really does not matter whether the sing that demonstrates one’s membership to that particular group is a language, nations, states, or it can be color of skin, shape of face, quality of hair, but also acquired skills like all doctors of medicine or all lawyers, or all teachers. Such a sign can be also a broader group, like proletarians, or intelligentsia, or nobility, or so called new money or old money.

If we pick people from the same group then, the probability of getting the same or at least extremely similar response to the same or very similar stimulus. I have really experienced people belonging to the same group saying exactly the same sentences, regardless what kind of group they belonged to. So demonstrated acting is very often group specific, which means people act similarly, which in turn means that the first law cannot be accepted fully. I might have some validity if we add that we consider people from different groups.

There is one more problem to this law. Sometimes the displayed reaction might slightly differ, but the substance of the reaction is usually the same, only the form of appearance might slightly differ.

The second law is correct. People from different groups are different but inside of particular group they act in similar ways, they have similar reactions.

The reason is quite simple: patterns, every group develops certain way of responding to stimuli, and every member of the group is expected to act according to these patters. Patterns enable fast reaction without using “hard” logical thinking. Like car driving, playing basketball or tennis. The same patterning occurs at the social level and the result is that different groups of humans have different types of responses, and therefore groups, societies are not equal.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

 

HIERARCHY VIII

Thomas L. Friedman, NEW YORK TIMES

Inspired by Thomas L. Friedman’s documentary and then after having found his home page in the Internet I decided to write a new post to my blog about the problems between Islamic world and the USA. Actually, it is not only Arabic or Islamic world that has problems with America and it appears as if they hated America. They usually say - in order to protect their feelings – sentences like these: You should not look down on us; America should not push everybody in the world around as it pleases etc. About the Twin Towers attack on September 11, they usually say: I do not agree, but it had to be done, it is good that America got a punch in the nose, and some other similar expressions. These are sentences that I have heard not only from the mouths of Islamic people, or some poor people, but I have heard exactly the same sentence on Czech TV, said by university graduates.

At that time I said that this is normal reaction of somebody who feels as a loser compared to a winner. Always when somebody is the first one, he is alone, and everybody wants to beat him. If it does not work then, at least such people then express their approval for actions made by somebody else. It is like: it is good that he was killed or, it is good that he was taught a lesson, etc.

Now I know that I was absolutely right. Only today I call it slightly differently, I say that it is the problem of hierarchy. What I mean is the relative feeling of one’s own position in the human heap. This is valid for every group and for every individual, and it is also valid for competition for position in hierarchy among groups, in this sense also among nations, states, or religions.

Therefore, if somebody says sentences like the ones above, we can immediately recognize that he feels inferior but would like to be at our level or even higher.

The total problematic of hierarchy is extremely simple, no one likes to be the last one, usually people do not have to be absolutely the first ones, only few are like that, and even such people admit, that the strength of positive emotions when winning is smaller than he negative emotion that emerges when losing. The reason for this might be found in evolutionary psychology, together with genetics and epigenetics. Most probably, we have this unpleasant feeling of being the last one or losing - which is not the same exactly but causes the same feelings - because the last animal in a herd have usually been always eaten up by some predator. And of course, we do not want to be eaten up.

What is so tremendously complex is the multitude of forms of appearance, forms in which this feeling demonstrates. It can be always something a different sentence. Typical example might be: you are not better than me, or Do you think you are something special?, or much more complex signals as when making better moves in chess you may laugh about the other player and giving him advices what he should do, and in this way play your card of momentarily superiority.

Basically the number of such displays of superiority is endless, and this makes it so difficult to understand that. Then next problem is that very often people do not want to call this phenomenon by its proper name because it might be “politically incorrect”.

 

HIERARCHY VII

HIERARCHY and OBESITY in WHITE and BLACK CHILDREN

Again I have found several interesting articles in the internet; they dealt with the obesity in US girls going or not enrolled to colleges; another article- called Psychological Status and Weight-Related Distress in Overweight or At-Risk-for-Overweight Children compared even the psychological stress in obese girls, boys, white as well as black.

The results in short are that girls reported more distress when obese than boys, black children reported also more distress than white children.

I see in this example par excellence for my idea of hierarchy in humans. A human feels relatively well when it feels that there is still somebody “under” him/her; that means the person does not feel the last one in the row. The person who feels last in the row will feel the highest distress. The row in this case is rather too simple and perfectly obvious: white boys feel being on the highest level in this group of humans, white girls feel subordinate to white boys; white obese girls are “under” the white boys but also under white non-obese girls. Black children altogether have the feeling of being lower in the hierarchy, they are “under” all white children, and obesity is the next “status symbol” showing the person’s rank.

Once we realize how important it is to feel or perceive our rank, and what everything we do, manifest, display by our behavior, we start to understand the responses of other people. I think that a remarkable number of all our reactions is based solely on our perceived rank in the human hierarchy.

But I also know that there are some limits to it. All poor people in one village are prepared to measure themselves against the richest man in the village. But this man’s wealth makes up not up to per cent of that of Bill Gates, and no one in the village would come with the idea to compare himself with Bill Gates. Out of which follows that humans make these comparisons of the ranks in human hierarchy only in certain layers of this hierarchy. Only those will be compared who seem standing “relatively” close in hierarchy and those who are “too” distant will no be compared. They will be taken as kings, as nobility, and nobody even tries to compare oneself with the king or nobility.

This idea is short by I hope it is also easy to grasp.

Monday, July 23, 2007

 

HIERARCHY VI

HIERARCHY VI

Immigrants, mental disorder, adaptation, informational environment, patterning, need for speed, evolution, differnces in signals and values,

Just only few days ago I read an article in Malta Independent Online about „boat people“, immigrants from Africa. In this article the author described how hierarchy functions in one group and what happens when “non-natives” come and become a part of this societal group.

Just this morning I came across another article dealing with similar topic, only in a bit different way. It discussed the psychiatric diseases emerging in immigrants, basically regardless the land they live in.

There are problems described of immigrants of different lands of origins coming to different other lands but the problems seem to be similar. These people are more likely to suffer some kind of psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia or depression. This article was published in “Gehirn und Geist”, nr.10, 2006. Many different studies have been carried out on this subject in UK, Holland, Sweden and other countries.

The main problem seems to be the problem of integration of immigrants into the new group, into the society on their new country. This causes then even hallucinations, social isolation and many other symptoms of psychiatric disorders.

After having read the article I realized that nobody mention the problem of hierarchy within a group of humans. The problem of immigrants as I see it is caused by discrepancies between the ability of the organism of immigrants at home, where they are real members of their society, and they feel as such, whereas in the new country they do not feel as a real part of the society. Now comes the question why is it so? And why only some suffer so much and some seem not to suffer?

I believe that the answer lies in the hierarchy and the ability of organism to “read” the signals that are broadcasted by its environment. In this case it means the ability of immigrants to read, perceive and properly decode, and properly react to some new signals that are emitted by the people in the new society. Every society has its values, and they may sometimes differ strongly and sometimes only little. The problem is whether immigrants can adapt to the new signals. It could even be that depression and schizophrenia only appear in individuals with strongly developed system of patterns valid only in one society, where the patterns do not permit for change in these patterns. Such people then necessarily assess all the new signal by their old patterns and the new signal do not fit in there. The process of adaptation, the process of trying to change the patterns might be the reason for depressions and other psychiatric deviations.

There are some other problems to this question. Why only some immigrants suffer these disorders, and why their children who were already born in the foreign country are more likely to suffer these problems as their parents?

I think that a good explanation could be the hierarchy, and the feeling of being accepted. Parents who come from their own country when they were maybe 25 or even older, experienced certain acceptance in their own country, they knew where their place in that society was. They could read all the signals their informational environment emitted and could behave accordingly, they just did fit in.

In the new informational environment some immigrants cannot read the signals and get confused, cannot find their place in the new hierarchy and this discrepancy may be the cause for the health disorders. But some of them can read the signals and have therefore no problems. On the other hand their children have never experienced the feeling of being accepted, they cannot read the signals and have never experienced success. Such immigrant children will suffer attacks of depression or schizophrenia.

Next question: why some of them do not have these problems? Usually immigrants who do not have these problems are these individuals who have in one way or another experienced success. Success shows that the person is accepted by its environment, this in turn regulates the position of the person in the hierarchy of the respective society. When a person experiences success the person knows about being accepted by the other members of the group the person is a member of. In our case immigrants are persons of foreign group.

I believe that this short excurse into the problem of schizophrenia and depressions in immigrants shows how powerful the feeling of hierarchy is, and what different impacts it can have when present and also when absent, even though only partially.

So it seems to me that this kind of depressions and schizophrenia in immigrants is the manifestation of incapability to adapt to new environment, the inability of brain to change the patterns we used to judge our environment. That in turn shows that human groups are evolving and developing not in the same way and in not the same speed. Also different people have differently stable patterns in their brains, some can change them easily, and thus adapt to new environment and some cannot. It seems to me that this again is linked to experienced success. If a person experienced a high success, created corresponding patterns, and that everything over a longer period of time, then such person can have hard problems in changing the patterns. And the manifestation of these difficulties can be depression and other mental disorders.

This is easier observed where superficial differences are great and therefore easy to observe, in groups of immigrant for example. If a person changes its informational environment within a larger group of people, like within one nation, the differences are not so obvious and more likely to be misinterpreted.

Sometimes it is only enough to move from city to a village and one can experience heavy problems. It does not have to be changing countries.

Actually, the fact that we, humans, get involved in the discussion about depressions and mental disorders in immigrants, shows that we usually perceive differences consciously only when they are big enough. We usually are not capable of consciously perceiving small differences. Something else is our subconsciousness. It perceives all the tiny differences and we sometimes display types of behavior we do not understand at all.

Why we have what some scientists call patterning? A pattern is a pre-constructed, pre-finished algorithm of behavior, of response to some informational input. The only plausible answer is the speed. Anytime we need a fast response, a fast reaction, we do not think really, we only use pre-fabricated patterns.

So the need for fast response developed patterns. I would like to discuss these two aspects of human, as well as animal systems of adaptation to environment here as well.


Speed, the fast reaction, is extremely important for all organisms, when responding to some situations. The ability of fast reaction, fast response can be inherited or it can be trained. Where do we need fast reactions? We can detect these in sports, for sure, in former times, in duels, and in even former times when fighting some other males for the right to reproduce. Any organism is occasionally or very often exposed to situations where speedy response is necessary. Humans, for example, need this capacity when driving a car. But we also need it in normal daily business; we need it when speaking with some other persons. Nobody likes to wait for answer for next two years; you will not speak to a person who cannot give you an immediate answer. The talk is becomes unpleasant when interrupted by too many and too long breaks

In order to be able to “produce” such fast reaction our brain has evolved patterns that it uses so that we do not have to really ponder what to answer. If we come across a situation that we have never seen before, our brain does usually two things; first, it tries to find whatever fast response that seems at least a bit plausible, and second, later on, our brain tries to figure out what the really good response should be. Sometimes we refer to such activities as reflecting, reflection, and we usually do that in the evening when alone. This reflecting is nothing else but creating new patterns that can be used later on when similar situation emerges again.

These patterns are necessary for survival, just imagine you would be in the forest, a big tree would be falling down in your direction and you would need two days to ponder about what to do, well, most probably you would not have these two days to your disposal, the tree would hit you and you would die.

Here I would like to stress that these patterns are not only logically produced, they are made also by experience, a non-conscious reaction to some information. A good example would be basketball. In order to hit the basket we never do any complex logical thinking, we only try to hit and constantly correct the force, the angle of the throw.

So the need for speed creates the necessity of patterning, because when organism is equipped with patterns it can react fast and thus survive. In order to develop faster we need logic that pre-fabricates our patterns only in head without necessity to experience something many times and learning from trial and mistake system.

As far as our immigrants are concerned I believe that these patterns can be and are inherited from generation to generation, if it were not so, each new organism would have to “discover” the same patterns and it would be a huge waste of time and resources. Therefore some immigrants cannot easily adapt to the change of a new society, and also therefore their children born already in the new country are still subject to the patterns inherited from their parents.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

 

HIERARCHY V

This might be rather lengthy post, but I have just expressed here my ideas on hierarchy, comparing and repeating as the basic pillars of evolution

Hierarchy, Comparing and Repeating

After several years of research in the fields of few sciences like, memetics, semiotics, evolutionary psychology, biology, ethology, genetics, epigenetics, physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics, neurology, linguistics and some others sciences I have come to conclusion that that what drives a man can be reduced to only few essential factors. On the other hand these few factors have an incredible multitude of facets, forms of appearance.
Here I would like to mention just two of them, as I believe they are the two main factors guiding human beings, and not only that, these two factors are – as I see it – valid for all live on earth, though I realize that it can sound too highbrow, and spite the fact that I realize that right now it might happen to be to difficult or totally impossible to prove my statements.

Hierarchy appears always when there are more than one individual in a group. And it does not matter whether it is a group of humans or group of some animals or even plants or only cells. Because of this hierarchy is on the second place of these two factors, and therefore I am going to discuss the phenomenon of comparing first and hierarchy afterwards.

Repeating is also absolutely necessary to allow for better responses to signals from our environment. Repeating can be thought of as the third factor needed for creation of systems that provide organisms with the abilities to react properly to their environment. Repeating reinforces the patterns stored in brain that are used for filtering out the proper reaction. Therefore I will give some small excurse to this topic too.

Comparing

What is difficult about explaining this phenomenon of comparing is that we do it without knowing that, the next problem is that all living creatures do that but we are unaware of that. Next problem is that different researches on this field come up with different terms. Somebody speaks of patterning, where I prefer the term filtering. So actually, semiotics, with its subpart linguistics is severely confusing the whole matter as different people use different terms to describe basically the same phenomenon.

So, what do I mean by comparing? And how should I explain that? I will try to start like this: All organisms constantly and without stop do check on their environment. We, people have our 5 senses that give us information about our environment. These senses never stop functioning. Even in the night when we sleep, our senses provide our brain with information about the position of our body in bed and therefore we never fall from our bed. Sometimes a man totally drunk can fall of his bed because alcohol blurred his senses and the ability of brain to process the delivered data.

Next example how comparing functions in humans would be this one: Just imagine you are sitting with me in a pub and I ask you to do the following: for only one second you turn your head and watch a picture on the wall, then you turn back to me and you answer my question whether you like or dislike the picture. Funny thing is that you will give me straight answer. You will say either “I like it” or “I do not like it”; and that after only one second of seeing the picture. How is this possible?

It is easy; your brain does the work for you. It compares all the colors from the picture with all the colors you have ever seen, it finds whether these are colors you usually like or dislike. Your brain also compares all the forms and shapes of objects on the picture with all the objects your brain has stored and the brain then decides whether the forms and shapes of objects are appealing to it. Your brain also compares the “mood” coming from the picture, and decides whether it is a good mood or a bad mood. This everything is done in less time than one second.

Next thing to show might be this comparison: A human being, as well as all, other creatures receives constantly signals from the “outside” world. Outside world means here their environment. It can be compared to a submarine. Submarine needs sonar and several other devices to be able to understand where it is, where it is heading to. If these devices were out of order the submarine would not know where it is and where it should go to. Of course, I mean the people inside of submarine and not the submarine itself.

Another example that could be used to explain this would be the case of anxiety in the dark streets. Usually every person feels uncomfortable when crossing or entering park, streets or some neighborhood where there is poor light only. The feeling is as that of the people in the submarine with non-functional sonar. Why do we feel uncomfortable? It is because our brain has too little information about the environment. The unpleasant feeling is actually a signal of brain that it cannot guarantee for our safety because it cannot check fully on our environment and cannot warn us against upcoming dangers. That is basically the same signal as pain. Pain is also only a signal that tells the organism:”Hello, buddy, you got hurt.” The unpleasant feeling we have when deprived of one of our senses, especially seeing or hearing is nothing but a pain signal of our brain saying: “Hello, buddy, here I cannot guarantee for your safety, get out of here, so that I can again take care of your safety.”

So here human brain has learned a lesson, not only that it can warn us when some danger is approaching us, it also warns us when it cannot fulfill its duties. It is only us who do not know what all our brain is doing for us. Extremely often we misinterpret the signals of our brain, and even more often we even do not know that our brain send signals to us.

Another good example how to explain the comparing function of our brain is car driving, or sports. Actually we could take whatever human activity known to us as an activity that requires some or thorough training. So, let’s start with car driving. When a person sits behind the steering wheel for the first time, one can see how the person’s brain is working hard: trying to catch and compare all the information coming. This is impossible and so the person reduces the speed of the car. Slower speed means slower influx of information to brain. Then after many miles driven the same person can drive 200kmh on German autobahn and listen to music or have a nice talk with the other persons in the car. This would have been impossible to master on the first day behind the steering wheel.

So what happened? Well, the brain has learned, minimally two things: first, it learned, stored situations, pictures of traffic, it created patterns, it had recognized and stored patterns. Second it has also learned to omit information that is not necessarily needed for driving. Based on these two things our brain is capable of driving car fast. All the situations that are delivered to our brain as signals about the outside world are processed, that means compared to all the stored information be it in form of patterns or not, and our brain give us always the best possible solution.

The same functions with sports. I like to use the example of ice-hockey goalkeeper. A puck shot at the goalkeeper usually has the speed of about 150kmh. That is 41.66 meters a second. Usually a puck is shot from a distance of 5 meters. That means that the goalkeeper has only one eights of a second to react, it is 0.125 seconds, and the normal human reaction time is approximately 0.2 seconds. That means the goalkeeper has basically no chance to catch the puck, but he does in the majority of cases. How is this possible? The goalie has learned through training to recognize other signals, like the speed of the attacking player, the angle he is coming from, the way he carries his stick, etc. All these information contribute to proper solution of the problem. And the problem is to catch the puck, and the goalie catches it.

One might think of hundreds of such examples, a basketball player throwing the ball to the basket is another good example, when we compare what a basketball player is doing and what a we do when we shoot a rifle. When shooting a rifle we have put three points into one line and we hit the target. When playing basketball we do not have any aiming devices, nevertheless we hit the basket too. Our brain makes all the necessary computations, it computes the distance the height, and the parabolic trajectory of the ball, and the strength we must apply to give the ball the correct momentum so that we are not to short and not too long for the basket.

From the evolutionary point of view comparing had to occur already several billion years ago. Even prokaryotes had to “understand” some signals. These signals were only the ones we know from physics, radiation of sun light, radiation of warmth, radiation of sound waves etc. AS they did understand these signals they could then develop into prokaryotes, and later on start to form more complex organisms. As prokaryotes are extremely simple organisms it took them so long to develop into prokaryotes, more than 2 billion years. From eukaryotes to first higher organisms it took then less than one billion years, and the real boom in the development and evolution of new organism took place a bit more than 500 million years ago.

Thus comparing is one of the most powerful systems applied by evolution. Actually it is logical that comparing can be the only system that brings us forward in understanding our lives and our surroundings. Every science compares, astronomy does that too, weather forecast models are based on comparing, any learning is based on comparing. Very often we compare without knowing that we are doing any comparing. Just recall the case with the picture. Hardly any person you give the task will realize what kind of work their brain is doing. It performs comparing but hardly anybody knows that or feels that. Usually we just only answer the question, without knowing what it takes to produce the answer.

To show how complex this all is I would like to mention the case that really happened when studying the brain. Several doctors making neurological research on one woman with slightly damaged brain after some brain surgery were testing responses when they touched her laugh center in her brain. The woman burst out in laugh. When asked why she laughed she answered: „Because you are standing so funny around me.”

This seems and also is pretty illogical answer. But the only one her brain was capable to produce. What actually happened? Well, the woman’s brain “knew several things. It knew that it was asked a question. It knew that it gave signals to lungs, to lips, to face muscles and other body organs to produce laugh. But it also did know that there was no reason to laugh. So the brain had to “invent” a reason for laughing. The only reason it could make sound plausible was that the doctors seem to stand there I a funny way. Her brain was desperately looking for something that might remotely resemble some good reason for laughing.

So, what brain is capable of performing is not only comparing but also evaluating; but evaluation is nothing else than comparing again. Here we can see ho complex and how simple our brain is at the same time. Our brain is really a champion in comparing; it compares signals emitted or broadcasted by our environment, always and constantly, and by this activity it also creates and stores patterns for faster filtering the proper reaction next time. The aim of making and storing patterns and using them as a filter for future actions is the necessity of fast reaction.

Let’s show a clear example for the need of fast reaction. One of such cases of bad need for fast reaction is the male fight for the position in hierarchy or the fight for females. In a fight all responses to the actions of the rival must be fast. Imagine what chances a male would have in such a fight when he would ponder how to hit his opponent. Most probably his chances would tend to nil. He would lose. But the purpose of such a fight is not to lose, it is to win. In such a case it is necessary to respond fast, and hit the opponent so fast and so severe that he cannot respond anymore. This can be done only by training. One must train how to hit. And by repeating that is by training, doing several times the same movement, our brain creates patterns. The more we train something the better we usually get. Of course, because we have trained we have reinforced not only our patterns and but also the activities of our brain while training. That means our brain learns how to compare and how to store and how to recall particular patterns. Thus repeating becomes also extremely important from the evolutionary point of view.

Repeating

It is not only humans already equipped with relatively highly developed brain and nervous system who need to repeat in order to be better at fast response. Animals must learn this too. Let’s imagine the case of a rabbit and an eagle. Eagle is a predator and wants to catch the rabbit to get its meal. A rabbit, of course, does not want to get eaten up. Both of them then must do some training, some repeating. Eagle must get better at flying and catching the rabbit and the rabbit must get better at fleeing. One of the decisive factors for a successful escape is to be well-informed about one’s environment. The first signal the rabbit should realize is the size and the speed of something approaching him. Size is important as when something is bigger then me I can get eaten up, as I am not strong enough to win a fight with somebody who is bigger. Bigger organisms are usually stronger. Speed is important for fleeing. If something bigger is approaching me and it is really much slower as I am, well, no problem, I can wait until this something comes closer and decide later whether I must flee or not. If something is remarkably bigger than me and also remarkably faster than me, then, I have a problem. I cannot fight and I cannot escape.

What does this has in common with repeating? Well, the organisms, in our case the rabbit had to learn to judge the size and the speed from distance. They had to realize that something that is in a large distance and appears as small might be really big, they also had to learn to judge the speed, as something that is close to us appears as moving fast and something that is far away appears as moving slow even though both objects are moving at the same speed. This learning process, this creating of patterns is possible only by repeating.

Organism perceiving something small and slow in a huge distance might be really surprised at he size and the speed of the predator when it comes closer. This experience must be stored and a pattern must be created and stored. A pattern will be only created when the same phenomenon repeats. Our brain and all the nervous systems have learned not to store ballast for ever. The only signal of importance for a particular phenomenon is the number of repetitions of this phenomenon.

Out of it I would conclude that our brain has created a memory system that I call M-L-M, multi-level memory. The less important some phenomenon is the lower the level of memory in which it is stored. The more important such a phenomenon the higher the memory level where it is stored by brain. Now this question must come: how does brain decides whether some phenomenon is or is not important? Brain makes this decision on the bases of number of repetitions of the phenomenon. That is, if some phenomenon repeats very often then it is shifted to the next higher level of memory an is more easily accessible for brain, which is good as it can produce really fast reaction to signals. If some phenomenon appears really sporadically, it is stored in some lower levels of MLM and is not so easily accessible, because it is not so important to be able to have a super fast response to something that is not so important. Brain is saving his capacities for the important stuff.

Therefore also some information and patterns that had been stored a long time ago and for a long time there was no use for them are shifted to lower levels of memory. One can easily observe this when leaning foreign languages and then not using the acquired knowledge. This knowledge slowly disappears.

Repeating is the system enabling evolution; it is the gauge for measuring the importance of some phenomenon. The importance of some phenomenon and its storing on different levels of memory is actually the first hierarchy; hierarchy of memory, hierarchy of important and less important signals. This hierarchy allows for safety and also for further investigating the environment. I we were always only terribly afraid of whatever were happening around us we could not go any further, we could not explore our surroundings, we would stay were we are not proceeding. We would be shock-frozen because of everything. In order to be able to do some exploring organism must recognize whether some signal is really dangerous or not. There must be hierarchy of signals, hierarchy of patterns and hierarchy of fears.


Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a simple system; one organism is higher than the other. What makes hierarchy so tricky is the tremendous number of forms of appearance. How people express their hierarchy is also not simple. Sometimes some status symbols are used to demonstrate one’s place in the hierarchy, sometimes it is the way of speaking, etc. The row of means of manifesting one’s own position in the human hierarchy is sheer endless. Sometimes it is the way of behaving.

Again there is endless number of examples of demonstrating the level in hierarchy among animals. Dogs for example like to sleep on sofas or some higher elevated places. The reason for such behavior is hierarchy. In a group of wolves the chief of the group sleeps on the highest place, and then all other wolves according to their place in hierarchy sleep below him, lower. The lowest dog sleeps on the lowest place. If a dog is with humans it automatically knows that it is lower than humans, so the hierarchy is no problem, only there is a rule that nobody likes to be constantly the last one, the one on the lowest level of hierarchy. And so dogs like to sleep higher to “escape” their lowest level in hierarchy, to get a better feeling of their own importance.

Quite recently I read and article in Malta Independent Online, there was an article where one could see that so called “boat people”, the refugees from Africa, constitute the absolute bottom of society on Malta. Interesting was that Maltese people from the very bottom of Maltese society feel a level higher than these refuges. In such a way we see that hierarchy is omnipresent. It functions on Malta as it did in the times of Roman Empire, or in ancient Egypt.

Hierarchy can be very easily observed in a classroom. A good teacher in a class of some vocational school can see all the tricks the kids are using in fight for their position in the hierarchy of the class. Why vocational school is a better place for such observations? It is because the kids from lower layers of society usually attend such schools and these kids are less “socialized”. They act more guided by their emotions than logic, and therefore it is easier to observe and notice what they actually do.

There are different kinds of hierarchy. One is among males and females. This is extremely interesting field to study and observe. In ethology one can get information about hierarchy of males and females among animals. Let’s take a lion. A male lion does not catches prey, it is the task of lioness to do so, then, when some antelope is caught she “calls” her lion and “master” and he gets his stomach full, she can get something to eat after he is full and something remains. Well, we humans have developed a bit since these times and we can eat at the same table, men and women. In some societies of this world this is still a stage of evolution that has not been reached. In such societies women are very often treated worse then stock. Just think of ritual mutilation of female genitals, and the way they must do all the work while men usually do only little, close to nothing.

We, humans, have pretty complex system of hierarchy. One is between men and women, other are for example king and his knights, knights and their servant, and then come slaves. At each level we have other levels. Just think of some teams in a league. There are several basketball leagues in each country, in every league we have many teams, in every team we have many players, and all these pieces are organized in hierarchy, some nations play basketball better than the other nations, in every nation there is some top league, whatever it is called, in every league there are teams and only one team can be the best, the number one in that league, and in every team we have players who also are organized by their abilities into hierarchy.

Let’s go back a bit to the kind of demonstrating one’s hierarchy level. As I have written before, dogs have the signal of hierarchy according to the place where they sleep. We have actually also accepted this elevated place as an expression of hierarchy in our human society. Knight and kings used to build their castles on hills, and all of their servants used to live under the castle. One can still see this organization when visiting a village with a castle. All today bosses usually have their offices on a higher floors, if a boss is speaking to his personnel, he usually does that from some elevated place, just think of trade unions leaders, or politicians during their election campaigns, think of sportsmen being honored, the first one is on the highest step, the second a bit lower and the third one stands on a step still a bit lower, the fourth one is not allowed to stand on the winner steps. In such a way we can see that elevated place is expression of hierarchy not only among dogs and some other animals, but also in human societies.

I will try to give here several examples of other expressions of hierarchy in human societies. The list of such examples can never be full and complete, as the tricks used to acquire the higher position or pretend having the higher position also develops, there is no standstill in evolution.

Once when working for chamber of commerce in one small Czech town I went to introduce myself to chiefs of different town and state offices. One of them reacted in a way I did not understand for along time. When I introduced myself with my name and my function as a professor of economics at one American university, he said approximately this: “We are not going to build here some university for you.” I was shocked as this had nothing to do with normal personal introduction. Only years later, I got it. It was his reaction to his disturbed perceiving of his own position in human society. He believed that his position is higher as the boss of one state office in the town. When I told him I was a professor, he perceived his position as lower than mine; this made him feel uncomfortable and he felt the need to correct this feeling of discrepancy. He could not elevate his position so he needed to sink mine. How could he possibly do it? He could say what ever what lowers my rank in the town. And for sure, if there is no university in the town so I am a professor of nothing and his position is again a bit higher. And that’s what he really did. Funny thing about such human responses is that they are incredible fast.

This would mean that we are pre-wired for such responses. How can this happen? The answer is the repetition. The man was used to fight, instead of helping other people he was the one who fights them to be the boss. His brain was trained at fast responses in protecting his position.

One could conclude that people who behave like this had experienced mostly fights for position in hierarchy, most probably they were never too good at school, and most probably they had to substitute the knowledge and altruism by fight for position. Such people are in general very dangerous. Think of Hitler, Stalin, and basically all “great” man in our history. Instead of helping they wanted their own feeling of being at the top of hierarchy.

A man or a woman can be on the top of hierarchy when helping others. The problem is that not so many people will understand this. Most people will fight for their position in hierarchy. This shows the level of “socialization” of individual persons within on society and of single societies among all societies. One can notice these differences when traveling among nations and staying a while to get the feeling for the respective society. In each society different systems of fight for hierarchy will by applied. The more these fights appear in one society the more the society is closer to animal realm than to human realm. There are no exact steps in evolution, evolution is developing without stop and there are no stages, in our sense. We only make these steps or stages or levels in order to get a better grasp of evolution.

Hierarchy has something to do with authority. There are several types of authority, for my purpose it is enough to use just two. These two are related to the power. One is power of knowledge, the other one is power of punishing, causing pain or death. The first one is positive the other one is negative but alas also needed. There are human beings that for different reasons are not capable of submitting to the power of knowledge and therefore they must be brought to order by power to punish. Just recall the myth of Moses, as he got the stone plate with Ten Commandments on it. Most probably he just did not know what to do so that his wild troops start to behave, as they refused to obey him. So he used the trick with the God giving him the plate saying how the people should behave properly. And they did, they accepted the commandments. I was about 2000 years ago, and we still need them to make people behave as people and not as animals.

Of course, as everything, also hierarchy can be misused. Originally designed for getting the opportunity to mate, now it is used for similar and different purposes. Every top man in human history who ruled some nation usually had many women. So we do not differ so much from wild horses, crocodiles, dogs and so on. The reason is evolution. If we were something really special we would not have these animal traits that we have in multitude, because we have developed from all these experiences several hundred million years ago. And our biological information system, DNA has stored all the necessary information, and we behave accordingly. Though not realizing it.

Friday, July 20, 2007

 

HIERARCHY IV

Why do women do things that normally only men do in order to impress women and get thier "yes" for having sex with them? That is the question.

http://www.amyvandonsel.com/2007/07/19/the-evolutionary-psychology-of-creation/

This link was brought to me by GOOGLE Alerts, and I found it so interesting that I even wrote my answer to this post. Have a look what the author writes and then read my ideas to that topic. Of course, I might be totally wrong, but I think I am not.

Why do women write books, go to work, etc…That was your question. As far as I am concerned the answer is simple in its principle but complex in the multitudes of facets, forms of appearance. The answer is hierarchy in human society, the personal position in the human hierarchy.

Females make the choice, but then they are “under” the males. If you do not trust me, have a look at ethology, and read about sexual and social habits of animals – as we are also only an animal, a biological breed – though a bit different from the others, but that’s evolution, we are a bit further. So women get “down under” –sort of, and as they do not like that feeling, as nobody likes that, even animals do not like to be the last one in the hierarchy of a particular group; they just copy what men do, as men gain power and higher position in hierarchy doing stuff in order to impress females. One and the same activity has minimally two fields, once male activities aim at impressing females, but also in getting higher level position in the hierarchy.

Females can observe this and copy these activities in order to get higher in the hierarchy, in order to attract admirer from higher level of society, and at the same time to get higher in order to have better feeling as when being totally down.

Nearly all human activities can be brought down to the problem of hierarchy. You may want to have a look at my posts on my blog www.hlavni-vos.blogspot.com

Sunday, July 15, 2007

 

Hierarchy again

This is again about hierarchy but pretty much hidden and not too obvious

Nothing to hide responses

An excellent observation about how people get used to think in the same way, sometimes their responses are only similar, sometimes they are completely the same, word by word. Here the author, Daniel J.Solove, describes responses of Americans to the fact that the USA government has started, carried out projects of data mining about the USA citizens. Basically, all the responses can be reduced down to the phrase:”I have nothing to hide, so I do not care.”

You may wan tot download the full text of this paper under this link
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Author tries to get scientific explanation for these reactions and tries to establish a definition what it means privacy. This approach is really useful but I see a better approach for such similarities in human responses. I have experienced several times that people who never had seen each other gave the same response. In such a case there must be a different explanation.

I suggest that the explanation lies in the similarity of the system that generates the response. We all are humans, but we go through different lives, and our values get slightly different. Some people went through more similar lives than the others, so there is a strong probability that they will respond in a similar way.

So I have heard two men, one in his late 40´s, the other one in his late 50´s, saying the sentence: “Now everybody would like to have a university degree.” It was the response to my proposal to establish a university or a college in one Czech town. For some time I was not able to decode the sentence. Later I found out that the motivation behind this sentence was the fear that the offsprings of these two men might not withstand the competition of so many new competitors, and also their own position in the hierarchy of this small town would come under the evolutionary pressure of competitors. So basically, this response is absolutely illogical, but extremely highly emotional.

The second time I have heard exactly the same response from two people who never had met before was the phrase: Czechs like to behave like the brave soldier Schweik.” This was a response to my criticism of Czech culture, Czech habits and traits displayed nowadays in the Czech Republic. Again I needed some time to decode the response. In this case the motivator is the perceived feeling of intelligent Czechs that what is happening here is a lost of basic culture that Czechs were used before, this on one side, on the other side it is a sentence protecting the group of Czechs to which these to people belong.

Again this response is not logical at all, it is only motivated by emotions. If one would like to apply logic to this statement one would have to know the story of “The brave soldier Schweik”. He was a poor man of incredibly low intelligence but anyway he somehow got through the tough years of WWI. So applying logic to this sentence would mean to maintain that Czechs are as stupid as this Soldier Schweik, which was no way the intention of the authors of the responses. The intention was to decrease the impact of my criticism of Czechs because they were Czechs too and felt that the group they belong to was offended.

The same happens with the reaction of Americans: “I have nothing to hide, so I do not care about my government mining data on me. What they want to say by this sentence basically means: I do not want to get involved with the government, they are too big mouthful for me, so I prefer to make out that I do not care, and in the direct competition with the author of the question, the second part comes:…”do you have something to hide?” This in turn shows a retort, that means – if you have something to hide that means that you are a bad guy, well and I have nothing to hide and therefore I am not a bad guy, which means I am standing above you in the hierarchy of American society.

So the situation is used or misused for a fight between two individuals in the hierarchy of human society and has absolutely nothing to do with logic, only with emotions, emotions of hierarchy.

The next reasonable question to ask were: where does the hierarchy from? I am not sure but I would suggest that it comes from the fact that the last one, the most handicapped is usually given up as a prey, as a target for predators. Therefore there might be a system evolved in our minds that we do not want to be eaten up and therefore we fight for higher position in hierarchy.

I am not 100 % sure to be right but as I gather information from all over the world in the Internet, I start to be more and more secure that I might be right. Quite recently I read an article about facts on Malta, and they show the same structure and the same principles.

When so called “boat people” , the African immigrants come to Malta, the lowest layer of the population on Malta feels a bit higher than these immigrants, and they gain on status, their position in hierarchy gets higher.

This pattern corresponds with a statement:”Nobody wants to be the last one.” And the reason for this statement might be the fear of being eaten up.

Friday, July 13, 2007

 

HIERARCHY III

HIERACHY IN HUMANS

It is possible to make use of some established rules, even between men and women, or males and females

Nobody wants to be the last one II

This is a strange idea…the submissiveness of a woman to a man, I had a sudden stroke of an idea that women misuse this knowledge and place themselves under the man and in doing so they gave the man the feeling of being something more and then the man is easier to be manipulated.

So actually, women make use of the rule that nobody wants to be the last one, like marriage swindler and gave the man the opportunity to play big, relatively seen, to have somebody bellow oneself, and in using this trick to get the man tied up to them.

How is that possible that men do not misuse this situation, well, they mostly do misuse that. I have heard many women saying that a woman plays the role of lightning conductor that means she must endure the bad moods of her man about his mishaps, about his bad boss, about not catching any pray, about not getting money enough etc.

There is another phenomenon in young females; some of them have only one wish to get married and stay at home and to prepare everything nice for their husband when he comes back from work. I knew a woman who complained about her daughter having just only this wish for a period of time. This might illustrate that at least in some young females coming from not very well functioning families who show this way of behavior may try to go to the oldest trick of how to get and how to keep a male. This old trick might well come from whatever former stage of evolution, simply speaking from the times when we still were real animals, sort of primates.

But men mostly do not kill women, sometimes they beat them, but it should be exceptions, at least in more developed and more socialized nations, or other groups of humans. This, conversely, might be the form of showing the predatorship stored in men. But why men do not kill women? Most probably there is a portion of a specific feeling for specific female, there are findings that in brain some chemicals are produce after sexual intercourse that cause the feeling of belonging to each other. There of course may be many other explanations, as the world and the evolution is not one way road, but shows plenty of facets of the same essence.

This is also a problem with medical diagnosis, there are many signs that may indicate something but also something else, only when taking many signals together we may hit the proper diagnosis.

The basis of life seems relatively easy to understand, the forms in which life manifests itself are in such a multitude that we have nearly no chance to get them all and understand this multitude of appearance forms of all the phenomena of life

 

HIERARCHY II

Hierarchy in humans

this is my second post today inspired by the article of Daphne Caruana Galizia from Malta. I checked my ideas with a friend of mine who is a suoper expert on evolutionary psychology and he said my ideas seem plausible. So here are they.

Nobody wants to be the last one

I was shocked reading the article by Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta Independent Online about working-class housewives voting for some specific politicians on Malta. I have contacted the author and we shortly discussed that topic. I offered my theory of hierarchy in human society, where I maintain that nobody likes to be at the very bottom of that society. Apparently, even on Malta this is absolutely valid: the lower layers of Maltese society are sort of “happy” about so called “boat people”, the African refuges who come to Malta on boats, as these are looked down on by the lowest “domestic layer of people.

Realizing that my theory is really valid all over the world about all people and all nations and all groups, I recalled that there findings on two opposite feelings or emotions: one is the feeling one has when winning something and the other is the feeling of losing something.

Actually, one can find world-known personalities giving their comments to this question, and mostly even these personalities, e.g. McEnroe, maintain that they hate the feeling of losing much more than they like the feeling of winning. In other words the negative emotion of being the last one is stronger than the positive emotion of being the first.

And, of course, on should ask why it is so. It seems to me that this strange discrepancy in the strength of feelings or emotions is given by fear. Fear is most probably the strongest emotion anybody known by now can have.

What I mean is a very specific type of fear, fear of being eaten and so being deprived of life. I thin k that his emotion evolved base on following fact, anybody in the evolution and still in the animal realm when got hurt, being a sort of disabled is usually an easy pray for predators, very often even expelled from its own herd, being left on its own and then eaten up by some predator, lion, for example.

So it makes even sense in humans when they do not like to be the last one, this feeling might by based on the unconscious idea of not wanting to be eaten up. In the long billions of years of evolution there always has been some kind of predator eating up the handicapped, the last ones.

I do not know if this possible explanation is the correct one but it seems very plausible to me.

 

HIERARCHY

HIERARCHY IN HUMAN HERD

http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=54218

This link will bring you to article by Daphne Caruana Galizia in MALTA INDEPENDENT ONLINE. My today´s post is a copy of my email to Daphne.


Hello Daphne,

Your article in Malta Independent Online is excellent; I do not know the two men, as I live in The Czech Republic. The most striking finding in your work is the fact about proletarian housewives. You have delivered a perfect evidence for my theory of “underdogs”, or in better words: the theory of hierarchy in human herd.

Humans are very special kind of animals, and they live in herds, as horses, wolves, bat vampires and many other animals. To explain the hierarchy in humans let’s first have a look at wolves. The chief wolf sleeps on the highest place available, the other wolves according to there status in the hierarchy of their herd sleep then lower, the last member of the herd sleeps at the lowest place available. The rests of this emotional behavior can be seen in dogs: they like it extremely much to sleep on sofas, chair or anything at least slightly elevated.

Humans, without knowing it behave in a similar way: all the bosses usually speak to crowds from some elevated place, a king had his throne, castles were built on hills and the rest of the people had their houses lower, etc. You can surely think of many other examples.

Now, proletarian housewives are pretty low in the hierarchy of human herd, first married to relatively poor guys, and selves not contributing to the wealth of their family, not going to work, and therefore feeling a bit useless in two ways. Not mentioning the emotional status of a woman and man in the hierarchy of human society throughout the evolution.

As nobody likes to be at the absolute bottom of a herd – as the dog sleeping on a sofa – or close to it – the proletarian housewives are a bit higher than homeless – they tend to try to get someone under themselves. It seems to me that these two men have emotionally understood this, not in the logical way, and make use of this fact in the human hierarchy. And who could get easily under these women? Well, anyone who differs in some remarkable way, e.g. the color of skin, therefore the blacks or Afro-Americans.

Your observation, that I take for granted as it perfectly fits my theory of hierarchy, really supplies additional facts and support for my theory.

Hopefully, you are not angry that I took my courage and wrote you my comments on your paper. And there is my blog where you can – in the English section - read my ideas –to this and several other topics.

www.hlavni-vos.blogspot.com

with a lot of wishes for more such well-thought observations

and many greetings

Borek

Sunday, July 08, 2007

 

Friendship, emotion, attraction, wealth, money and logic

Hello again after some time. Google brought me some new links and one of them is this one

http://berangeredagert.blogs.bankruptcyhelp.org.uk/2007/07/07/friendships-does-difference-in-wealth-hurt-or-help/

Friendships - Does Difference in Wealth Hurt or Help?

and this is my comment to it, like it or not, it is so.

Well, there is a bias in this article. The wealth is a means of forming groups, if you are not member of the group then , of course , you cannot have any friends there, and do not forget, there is always one percent reserved for exceptions. But even these one-percent exceptions can be explained. So you can have basically friends only in your group. So actually wealth and money comes before friendship.

There is a possibility that a rich person, for some time, and sometimes for ever, will have a friend on a much lower social level, it is very rare but is can happen. Nevertheless, we must understand that any kind of logical or scientific thinking must involve the number of occurrence of a particular phenomenon, hence one or two cases are only exceptions, but the rule goes with the majority.

You may ask yourself how many friends you have among poor Albanians or among the hundred riches people of the world. None? Well, then there must be some bias to your thinking don’t you think??

The second bias is a funny use of the word “emotion”. Well, sure, friendship is based upon some kind of “chemistry” that we can call emotion. But, there is some need for explaining what emotion is, how it comes to being, and why it is not logical at first sight. Emotions are actually systems of prefabricated responses; some of them are really old and passed over by sexual reproduction, in DNA and ncDNA, mostly in ncDNA. There is no way how to escape the stored information, we just “obey” the orders our DNA produces. But do not forget that this information is constantly refined by experience.

And people from the same group have more similar prefabricated emotions, and therefore they will try to have friends within that group.

Friendship is similar attraction to a person as sexual attraction to a sexual mate. Every group makes its own inner system of signs in communication, if you do not master those you will not be accepted to the group, if not accepted to the group you cannot have friends there. As well as you cannot mate Paris Hilton because you will never belong to her group and therefore you will have no chance to have her as a mate or as a friend.

Real friendship is based upon equality, and one sign of equality is money, wealth and other status symbols we use for determining the whether one belongs to a particular group or not.

Try to rethink this phenomenon, maybe you will find some other, highly interesting aspects of hierarchical organization of human society.

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