Evolutionary psychologists would suggest that instead we consider our hunter–gatherer past. Speculating in too much detail is dangerous since we have rather little information about the far past, but many authors have provided good descriptions based on the available evidence (Dunbar
1996; Leakey 1994; Mithen 1996; Tudge 1995). They tend to agree that people lived in groups of roughly 100–250 people, with strong family ties and complex social rules. Women tended to gather the plant foods and men to hunt. Life expectancy was short compared with today. Density of population was limited by the large area of land needed for this lifestyle and there were predators and disease to worry about. However, providing the food would not take all day and there would have been many hours left over.
In such a situation would it make sense to keep on thinking all the time? Would those endless thoughts have justified their energy costs in terms of survival advantage? Or would it have been better to save the energy and be able just to sit and not think – as cats appear to do when resting in the sun? I am only speculating but I would suggest that it may have benefited the genes more if we could stop thinking sometimes and conserve valuable resources. Why, then, can we not?
The answer from memetics is to start thinking in terms of replicators trying to get copied.
First, let us think about brains without memes. If the brain really is a Darwin machine then the thoughts, perceptions, ideas, memories, and so on, that go on inside it must all be competing for the brain’s limited processing resources. Natural selection will have ensured that the brain’s attention mechanisms generally devote most resources to the processing that helps the genes that made it. Within those constraints, all the thoughts and ideas will compete for attention and the chance to get copied. However, they are limited to one brain and subject to the pressures of natural selection.
Now imagine a brain capable of imitation – a brain with memes. A brain with memes not only has much more information to store, but the memes themselves are tools for thinking with (Dennett 1991). Far more kinds of thinking are possible when you have learned words, stories, the structure of arguments, or new ways of thinking about love, logic or science. There are now far more thoughts competing for the same limited processing capacity of the brain. Not only that, but memes can also get copied from one brain to another.
If a meme can get itself successfully copied it will. One way to do so is to command the resources of someone’s brain and make them keep on rehearsing it, so giving that meme a competitive edge over memes that do not get rehearsed. Memes like this are not only more likely to be remembered but also to be ‘on your mind’ when you next speak to someone else. If we take stories as an example, a story that has great emotional impact, or for any other reason has the effect that you just
cannot stop thinking about it, will go round and round in your head. This will consolidate the memory for that story and will also mean that, since you are thinking about it a lot, you are more likely to pass it on to someone else, who may be similarly affected.
We may now ask the question I posed at the start.
Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?
Compare a meme that not only grabs the attention but tends to make its host keep on mentally rehearsing it, with one that buries itself quietly in memory and is never rehearsed, or a thought that is too boring ever to think again.
Which will do better? Other things being equal, the first type will. So these are the thoughts that get passed on again while the others simply fade away. The consequence is that the world of memes – the meme pool – fills up with the kinds of thoughts that people tend to think about. We all come across them and so we all think an awful lot. The reason ‘I’ cannot compel myself to stop thinking is that millions of memes are competing for the space in ‘my’ brain.
Note that this is just a general principle designed to show why we think so much. We should also be able to find out which kinds of memes these successful ones are. For example, they may be ones that trigger certain emotional responses, or which relate to the core needs for sex and food – and evolutionary psychology can help us here. They may be ones that provide especially good tools for creating more memes, or which fit neatly into already installed memeplexes like political ideologies or belief in astrology. But exploring these reasons is a more specific task and I shall return to it later. For the moment I want only to show how general principles of memetics can help us understand the nature of our minds.
I think of this as the ‘weed theory’ of memes. An empty mind is a bit like my vegetable garden when I have dug and cleared and hoed it. The earth is brown, rough, rich and ready for anything that wants to grow. A week or two later there are little bits of green poking up in places; another week or two later there are serious plants dotted about; and soon the whole plot is covered in green, tangled with creepers, thrusting with tall leaves, and not a spot of brown earth can be seen. The reason is obvious. If something can grow it will. There are far more seeds in the soil and in the air than can possibly grow into mature plants, and as soon as any one of them finds itself with space, water and light, off it goes. That is just what seeds do. Memes do just the same with brains. Whenever there is any spare thinking capacity memes will come along and use it up. Even
when we are already thinking about something absolutely gripping any other idea that is even more gripping may displace the first from its position, improve its chance of getting passed on, and so increase the likelihood of someone else being infected with it. On this view the practice of meditation is a kind of mental weeding.
There are other analogies in the world of biology (although we must remember they are only analogies). Take a forest, for example. In a forest every tree has to compete for light, so genes for growing tall trunks will do well and tend to spread in the gene pool, as all the trees carrying genes for shorter trunks die out in the gloom below. In the end the forest will consist of trees that all have the tallest trunks they can manage to create.
Who benefits? Not the trees. They have all invested enormous amounts of energy into growing the trunks and are still competing with each other. There is no way that they could come to a gentleman’s agreement not to bother with trunks, for if some of them did, a cheat could always succeed by breaking the pact. So forests are a common creation all over the planet. The beneficiary is the successful gene, not the trees.
Returning to our poor overactive brains, we can ask again – who benefits? The constant thinking does not apparently benefit our genes, and nor does it make us happy. The point is that once memes have appeared the pressure to keep thinking all the time is inevitable. With all this competition going on the main casualty is a peaceful mind.
Of course, neither the genes nor the memes care about that – they are just mindlessly replicating. They have no foresight and they could not plan according to the consequences of their actions – even if they did care. We should not expect them to have created a happy and relaxing life for us and indeed they have not.
I have used this simple example to show the way in which I want to use memetics to understand the human mind. Later I will use the same approach to ask a closely related question – why do people talk so much? You may already think the answer is obvious, but before we explore the many ramifications of this one I want to add an important word of caution.
Not everything is a meme!
Not everything is a meme
Once you grasp the basic idea of memes it is all too easy to get carried away with enthusiasm and to think of everything as a meme – to equate memes with ideas, or thoughts, or beliefs, or the contents of consciousness,
or anything you can think of. This tendency is deeply confusing and gets in the way of understanding what memes can and cannot do. We need to start with a clear and precise definition of the meme and decide just what does and does not count.
The most important point to remember is that, as in Dawkins’s original formulation, memes are passed on by imitation. I have described them as ‘instructions for carrying out behaviour, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation’. The new
Oxford English Dictionary
gives meme (mi:m),
n. Biol.
(shortened from
mimeme…
that which is imitated, after GENE
n.
) An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non–genetic means, esp. imitation’. Imitation is a kind of replication, or copying, and that is what makes the meme a replicator and gives it its replicator power. You could even say that ‘a meme is whatever it is that is passed on by imitation’ – if it didn’t sound so awkward.
We may (and will) argue about just what counts as imitation but for now I shall use the word ‘in the broad sense’, as Dawkins did. When I say ‘imitation’ I mean to include passing on information by using language, reading, and instruction, as well as other complex skills and behaviours. Imitation includes any kind of copying of ideas and behaviours from one person to another. So when you hear a story and pass on the gist to someone else, you have copied a meme. The important point is that the emphasis on imitation allows us to rule out all kinds of things which cannot be passed on and therefore cannot be counted as memes.
Look away from this page for a moment and rest your eyes on the window, the wall, a piece of furniture or a plant. Anything will do, but just look quietly at it for – say – five seconds before you come back to reading. I presume you experienced something. There were sights, sounds, and impressions that made up your experience in those few seconds. Did they involve memes? Perhaps you said to yourself ‘That plant needs watering’ or ‘I’ wish there weren’t so much traffic outside’. If so, you were using words; you obtained those words memetically and you could pass them on again – but as for the perceptual experience itself – that does not necessarily involve memes.
Of course, you could argue that now we have language everything we experience is coloured by our memes. So let us consider the experiences of some other animal that does not have language. One of my cats will do as an example. She is not the brainiest of creatures but she does have a rich and interesting life and many capabilities despite having acquired next to nothing by imitation.
First of all she can see and hear. She can run after butterflies and
scamper up a tree – which requires complex perceptual and motor skills. She can taste and smell, and choose Whiskas over Katkins. She has a powerful sense of hierarchy and territory and will hiss at or run away from some cats, and play with others. She can obviously recognise individual cats and also some humans, responding to their voices, footsteps or touch, and can communicate with them using movement, physical contact and her own quite powerful voice. Her mental map is complex and detailed. I have no idea how far it stretches but it covers at least four human gardens, two roads and many human-made and cat-made paths. She can relate the position of a person at a window to the room they are in, and find the most direct route to the kitchen when the knife hits the bowl. And when she arrives, at the word ‘Hup’ she neatly stands on her hind legs and tucks in her front paws.
Her life includes many of the experiences that I can recognise in my life too – perception, memory, learning, exploration, food preferences, communication and social relationships. These are all examples of experiences and behaviours that have not been acquired by imitation and so are not memes. Note that my cat has done a lot of learning in her lifetime, and some of it from me, but it cannot be ‘passed on by imitation’.
If we are to be sure what is meant by a meme then we must carefully distinguish learning by imitation from other kinds of learning. Psychology traditionally deals with two major types of individual learning (i.e. learning by an individual animal or person) – classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, originally studied by Pavlov with his salivating dogs, two stimuli become associated by repeated pairing. My cat has probably learned to associate certain sounds with food-time, the sight of certain cats with fear, the sound of rain with ‘not a nice day to go out’, and so on. Just as I have learned to freeze at the sound of a dentist’s drill (and I still do, even though I have been given anaesthetics for the past 25 years!), and to relax with pleasure at the sound of the ice going in the gin and tonic. You could say that in classical conditioning some aspect of the environment has been copied into a brain, but it stops with that brain and cannot be passed on by imitation.
Operant conditioning is when a behaviour made by an animal is either rewarded or punished and therefore either increases or decreases in frequency. Skinner famously studied this kind of trial and error learning with his rats or pigeons in cages, pressing levers to obtain food. My cat probably learned to use the cat door by operant conditioning, as well as better ways of catching voles. She also learned to beg that way. At first she made feeble attempts to get her nose up to where I was holding the dish.
Then, in a process called shaping, I progressively rewarded her for ever neater and neater begging, finally hiding the dish behind my back and saying ‘Hup’. And in case you think this is unfair treatment of a small weak animal by a large and powerful one I should point out that she has successfully trained me to leave my desk to come and stroke her when required.
Skinner also pointed out the similarity between operant conditioning and natural selection – some behaviours are positively selected and others weeded out. In this way learning can be seen as an evolutionary system in which the instructions for carrying out behaviour are the replicators. Several selection theories of learning and of brain development have been proposed but as long as the behaviours cannot be passed on to someone else by imitation then they do not become memes and the selection is not memetic selection.