Thursday, January 26, 2012

Six degrees game

Today I was in a coffee place and there was this girl (A) playing a game with another girl (B) because A was indoctrinating B into a religious organization. The game was as follows:
A picks a random conversation topic.
B has to relate it to the scriptures in less than six steps.

The point of the game was, I think, mainly to give B practice for telling other people about her religion and why it is good. {to be clear I have no problems with the religion itself or even indoctrination methods; it's not my business}

I think this game is neat because playing it allows you to create a whole bunch different 'cognitive pathways' to one subject in your brain. You can make this node a major hub of your brain network. If people do this with religion it not only allows them be able to bring it up in conversation, but causes them to vastly increase the probability of the subject of the religion coming into their head. Therefore they become more religious because they're always thinking about the scriptures. Maybe this is a type of positive feedback loop.

Does this mean that if we think a lot about any particular subject, and then if we try one day to play the six-degrees game with the subject for a little while, we will create a positive feedback loop in our brain that will cause the subject to become of increasing importance in our mind (if our mind is left uninhibited to think what it comes upon)?

If anyone is reading this, which I assume not, but if you are and you know about this subject of Neuroscience/Psychology could you link me to some papers?

Would it be a nice personal experiment to try this with a topic? Perhaps dangerous?
If we picked something like scriptures, then we might make an impact on our lives. Perhaps certain pieces of media are meant for this sort of associative feedback reinforcement analysis. Perhaps if we create a little well connected node in our mind for a particular subject, in associating many other different subjects with this one, we will be able to better understand it.

Perhaps we can filter the mechanism by which connections are created with this node so particular types of effects in the growth pattern and effect of this subject node occur.

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