The idea that ideas are alive has been around a long time. Careful observation reveals that ideas, thoughts, and beliefs behave as if they are alive in the mind. When ideas grow and link together with other ideas they become big stories and can have multiple points of view and tangents. Large story ideas intertwined with emotion act more like dreams. There are daydreams when we are awake, and dreams in our mind when we are asleep. The key to changing these ideas, stories, dreams, and the emotions they carry is for the dreamer to wake up.
Richard Dawkins term for ideas that live like parasites in the mind and have a life of their own is meme. I suggest watching this video first.
This video from Dan Dennett on Memes and dangerous ideas that direct their host to kill the hosts of other meme’s is worth watching.
Scientist and author Richard Dawkins published “The Selfish Gene” in 1976. Some background is provided here on this Wikipedia page.
Topics covered in this podcast include, ideas the the mind, how they act as parasites, references to the movie Inception, how ideas spread, have a life of their own, go viral, how our ideas control what we do. Our mind is a host of ideas.