Why Ideas Cluster and People Disperse

Beliefs are, in many ways, what define each of us from a mental perspective. No two people in the world share the exact same belief system. These beliefs can range from something as simple as “egg whites are better than yolks” to deeply philosophical or theological questions like “Does God have a beard?”

The structure of a belief is highly sophisticated. I suspect it starts with how we perceive the world from the moment we exist as mere cells — perhaps even earlier, embedded in our DNA. However, I want to focus on the stage where we become individuals, holistic beings with minds capable of self-reflection.

The short version of my hypothesis is this: At some point in our development, we begin experiencing pleasure and pain in various forms, with an infinite spectrum of emotions in between. These sensations always occur in conjunction with external stimuli — people, scents, words, locations, sounds, and so on.

Since our minds are finely tuned pattern-recognition machines, they associate these complex internal emotions with the external stimuli present at that moment. Everything around us in that experience gets grouped together and labeled with the specific emotion we felt at the time.

Let’s call this Emotion X1, where X varies, representing the full scale emotions from infinite pain to infinite pleasure.

These associations are then stored in a vast, unconscious library — a spherical one, with ourselves at its center. The most intense and oldest emotional memories are closer to us, while the rest extend outward, scattered across infinite distances.

As we age and re-encounter familiar stimuli — whether people, words, or places — our past emotional associations resurface. However, they now appear in slightly altered configurations, leading to new emotional responses, which we’ll call Emotion X2.

Simplistically, our minds label everything in that experience with X2. Some elements will be newly labeled, while others already had the X1 label. When this happens, the new emotional label becomes an average of the previous and current experiences:

(X1 + X2) / 2

As we continue through life, every external pattern we encounter accumulates emotional weight, forming a running average:

(X1 + X2 + … + Xn) / n

The more a belief is reinforced by positive emotions the more it moved closer to us within the metaphorical, spherical library. In a feedback loop they become more salient to us or the first choice of lenses we use to “see” the world.

This applies not only to physical patterns — like people, foods, or objects — but also to digital entities, such as words or ideas.

But here’s where things get interesting and challenging.

Why, because it is good to associate pain with fingers in fire but when you associate pain with a non physical entity, like the word or image of fire, things get strange.

The Key Difference Between Physical and Digital Entities

There’s a fundamental difference between how physical and digital patterns evolve in our minds:

• Physical entities tend to disperse.
• Digital entities tend to cluster.

In physics, this is measured by entropy — a principle stating that physical systems naturally move toward disorder.

Recent studies support these fundamentally different observations:

• Entropy in physical systems increases (Thermodynamic Law).
• Entropy in digital systems decreases (Infodynamics Law).

As people with we are bound to balance these two colliding entropies in a process we name life.

Following these observations, at adiem.com, we build a wearable app and a platform that is leveraging the power of AI to observe how certain heartbeat patters evolve over time in both individual and collective setup.

We named it the intelligence of rhythm and one very interesting framework we resonate with is brilliantly exposed by Benjamin James in his research .