It’s not just a metaphor
This article is a mental virus. It can remain dormant indefinitely on Medium’s servers. But when you read it, it activates related ideas in your brain, interacting with them to create, at least temporarily, new ideas there. Those new ideas affect your behavior in unpredictable ways, possibly resulting in you writing new comments or articles on Medium.
So it goes with all of the ideas that we express orally or in writing and our expressions in other media, including paintings, photographs, music, and videos. Our brains take them in, and they change our brains, mutate there, and often emerge in new external forms.
Until recently we humans have been the only behavioral entities that we have known about who behave this way, but now we have evidence that some other animals are capable of this process, too. Furthermore, we have created computers and computer programs that can take our externally dormant expressions and recombine them in new ways as new “mind viruses”. And we have created a global internet that spreads them rapidly to other humans and computer programs.
The consequences for our future are profound and unpredictable.
