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Each layer of the meme-seed's covering is meant to bridge it to the next and towards the ultimate goal of the signal--the receiver doing what the sender wants--like a time released capsule or a layered gobstopper. The shiny, colorful surface convinces the target to pop it in their mouth. The cognitive exploits help them swallow it, the needs-fulfillment helps them digest it, and the intent is what the substance does to them.This approach to social engineering recapitulates the old idea expressed by hermeticists and alchemists that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm expressed in the formula "As Above, So Below". The parallelism between the structure of the brain, the internet, and people in the world is the ideal example of this adage. Studying the patterns of swarm intelligence within any of these structures can describe how the actions of individuals, be they people or neurons, lead to the complex behavior we call traffic, because the human brain operates much like a social structure.

Again, memes are not concerned with the content of the messages; instead they are computing instructions for a network. The hardware of this network is people and all of the physical and abstract objects they use to communicate and structure their behaviors. Individual neurons appear to be one level at which processing occurs, and they connect to each other as networks and into clusters as brain structures. Society, like the brain, displays features of neuroplasticity in the ways it physically and abstractly restructures and repurposes its connections and activities.

In the first section of this book we discussed the problem of inappropriately applied metaphors and the breakdown in communication. One of the criticisms of the brain-as-computer metaphor is the high degree of neuroplasticity the brain exhibits, with the criticism being that computers do not allow the software to change the hardware in the way that experience restructures the human brain. But we feel that the metaphor of brain-as-computer is accurate, and that perhaps our electronic computers are simply too primitive to exhibit this feature.