Massacres are often explained by referring to copycatting and mental problems, but never is such possibility presented that massacres could actually be caused by people, who have systemically re-programmed someone’s mind and irritated him so badly that he decided that massacre is what he wants to do. At that point he might not be fully able to consider his actions and there might have been underlying reasons for why he has been more affectable than some others, but nevertheless his mental state certainly wouldn’t explain everything.

Re-programming of mind doesn’t refer to any kind of cliche in the movies like to the word ’rosebud’, which would trigger a target person to act in some strange, scripted ways when he hears it e.g. via phone. Instead it is something that is very much connected to ”hard” (natural) and ”soft” (social) sciences. Think e.g. a possibility that other people keep one’s thoughs away from certain things and strengthen certain other thoughs, schemas and scripts, and how it could lead to synaptic pruning according to the ”use or loose” principle:

Certain terminal arbors are pruned by competition. The selection of the pruned terminal arbors follow the “use it or lose it” principle seen in synaptic plasticity. This means synapses that are frequently used have strong connections while the rarely used synapses are eliminated.

Lots of cognitive burden is caused to the mind, when it is forced to try to distinguish similar traits containing thoughs from each other and sometimes one just isn’t good enough at keeping them separate enough. That could lead to sharing of related neural networks in amounts that isn’t preferred and if competition principle is taken granted, it would also, eventually, lead to partial pruning in some parts of related (*) neural network.

Information technology terminology contains lots of words, which could be associated to something occurring in real life and which would have almost nothing else in common but e.g. visually similarly presented relationship of some sort, ambiguous word, iconicity and toggleable state (e.g. inheritance, Hibernate, message-icon looking like an envelope and visibility state).

Those thoughs which target person isn’t using often enough, aren’t momentarily able to produce electric signals in his brain because of e.g. lack of potassium or aren’t well enough interconnected to other thoughs are more vulnerable to frequent bombarding with suggestions that in some sense strenghten competing parts of his neural networks. This could be seen as eventually leading to personality changes. Maybe.

Wouldn’t it be rightfully to ask if Sanna Sillanpää (Finnish shooting range killer, who had Master’s degree in computer science) and James Holmes (American movie theater killer, who had “undergraduate degree in neuroscience”) were harassed and re-programmed by others?


Julkaistu alunperin Medium-tilin kirjoituksissa.

(*) oversimplification, like it could be pointed where in the brain something is stored, but it might help if you momentarily think about network motifs