Here's something I wrote to decentralization at Yahoo! Groups a while ago:
I'm pretty sure that the distribution of a human's thoughts can be described by a power law. Humans believe strongly in a small number of ideas but don't care about most ideas/ thoughts. A thought is like an anthill, the result of interactions in a distributed environment. Neurons (or dendrites maybe, I don't know much about neurophysiology, sorry) are like ants, haha. Now I don't have any proof but here's why I think it's true:

- Impressions from our childhood have a larger influence on our person because they have more chances to connect to other thoughts. And the more we believe in them the more thoughts connect to them. So early impressions have better chances to connect, and become important to us, because they were early (Yahoo, Lycos, Amazon, Excite...) and they end up at the top of our internal Google result list, because many other thoughts link to them.

- It's harder to change an old man's habits than a kid's because the habits of an old person are connected to more thoughts and ideas.

- In the seventies Edward de Bono presented the idea that a thought is like a river. Once the water starts flowing it "attracts" water from the surroundings, which makes the river deeper and wider and so on, sounds like power laws in action doesn't it?

Not very scientific, sorry, but I haven't had the time nor the resources to do research about it. It's a hunch:-) Maybe someone else has come up with this before me. I haven't read about it anywhere though.

Rikard Linde
www.sprinterface.com

Check this message at Yahoo!

The responses were pretty cautious and made me realize that my presentation wasn't scientific enough... I think.
Update 2002-03-18:

• What is the global brain thinking right now? We can measure that by looking at web traffic. If the pages and sites represent the brain's thoughts then the most visited sites are the thoughts we believe in the most! Yahoo!, AOL and MS are on top of the list.
• What does that mean??

B