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Key points
- Memes activate brain circuits for imitation, empathy, and emotional response.
- Emotional expressions in memes make them more shareable and relatable.
- Memes convey non-verbal social cues often missing from text-based communication.
- Our engagement with memes offers valuable insights into or social and cultural understanding.
Your brain is biologically wired for memes.
Memes don’t just spread for fun; they tap into parts of the brain evolved to help us learn from others, develop skills, and adapt to our social environment. This goes beyond the memes tied to election cycles or scandals, focusing instead on the basic units of cultural information that shape our understanding of the world and the people in it.
Some memes are funny, others serve as propaganda, and some contain nuggets of truth. By paying attention to how we react to them, we can learn about our own cognitive and emotional processes. Like jokes, memes offer a way to explore complex ideas in a safer way, allowing us to express emotions, beliefs, and even cultural tensions without getting too personal.
The Selfish Meme
Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in the 1970s to describe a cultural unit of information that replicates and evolves, similar to genes in biology. He used the concept to explain how ideas and behaviors can be transmitted across and within generations (often extremely quickly) without relying on biological inheritance.
Dawkins proposed that memes, like genes, evolve through three processes: replication, variation, and selection. In this model, the memes that thrive are the ones best suited to their cultural environment, just like how successful genes spread through reproduction.
The Neuroscience of Imitating and Sharing
Psychologist Susan Blackmore expanded on the concept of memes, arguing that they play a crucial role in human survival and adaptation by enabling us to quickly share and replicate useful behaviors and ideas. Those who could effectively imitate and learn useful skills gained a survival advantage. For early humans, this meant learning skills like finding food or adapting to the social dynamics of their group.
Psychologist Adam McNamara drew on neuroimaging research to show that imitation is central to how memes spread, as our brains are naturally wired for it. We all have mirror neurons which are specialized brain cells that are designed to help us mimic the actions and behaviors of others. This ability to imitate, whether it's learning a language or adopting a cultural trend, is key to meme transmission.
Memes often tap into deep emotional and instinctual responses, which can make us more likely to share them without much conscious thought. Viral memes trigger strong emotions like humor, outrage, or joy. These same cognitive systems which helped early humans recognize threats, form social bonds, and learn survival strategies, now influence what we share online.
Recent research using machine learning to analyze the content of memes has shown that certain characteristics make some memes far more viral than others. The most viral memes tend to feature a specific character as the subject, displaying clear facial expressions, emotions, and body posture. In other words, the most shareable memes are those that transmit information that would normally be conveyed through non-verbal communication.
Text alone can’t capture all the subtle non-verbal cues we normally have access to in the physical world, but it may be that memes help to transmit social and emotional information that is normally inaccessible through solely text-based communication.
This is why we are particularly susceptible to certain types of memes. They bypass rational analysis and tap directly into the emotional and instinctual parts of the brain. Viral memes essentially "hack" our emotional systems, bypassing slower, more deliberate forms of processing.
The Complexity of Memes and Online Dialects
Computer science research using a dataset of 2 million image-based memes found that as memes reproduce and evolve, they often become more complex. In niche online communities, a meme might seem impenetrable to outsiders, layered with references, inside jokes, and subtle allusions. The references to previous memes and subculture-specific information may obscure any broader meaning, making these memes difficult to understand for outsiders
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulacra helps explain this process. In Baudrillard’s model, the most basic symbols initially reflect a basic reality. For example, a photo of a Shiba Inu dog is initially just a photo of a dog, and most people would easily recognize the subject of the image.
Over time, meanings shift with new reproductions. As layers of meaning and distortion are added, the symbol can become so detached from the original object that, without specific cultural knowledge, a person might not recognize any connection between the symbol and what it was originally meant to portray (Baudrillard called this hyperreality).
The increasing level of complexity over time across different cultures is very similar to the way both art and language develop. Artistic movements often build on previous styles, adding layers of meaning and references to symbols in other work that require a deep and specific understanding of cultural history to fully appreciate. What starts as a simple image or phrase can quickly transform into a sophisticated message that conveys both emotions and ideas, filled with cultural significance that only some people will understand.
Memes Are Meaningful
Memes help us to understand the pathway between cultural information and the parts of the brain that have evolved to process them. They tap into our neurological systems for imitation, prediction, empathy, and emotional response and show how individuals process and respond to cultural information.
An effective meme triggers deep cognitive and emotional processes, rooted in our evolutionary need to adapt to social cues. A viral meme can be universal, it is an image that can be shared and understood by people from different cultures and languages. While not every meme is profound, our engagement with them provides useful insights into human psychology, especially as digital media becomes a central mode of communication and cultural exchange.
Memes can also signal when we (or others) are becoming too deeply immersed in a single subculture. If the content you're sharing begins to resemble hyperreality—detached from broader social understanding—it may indicate that you’re adapting to a specific subgroup at the expense of engaging in wider social spaces. If most of your communication is incomprehensible outside a small group, it might be time to broaden your connections and reconnect with a more general social reality.
References
Blackmore, S. (2005). Evidence for memetic drive? In Perspectives on Imitation, S. Hurley and N. Chater (Eds.). The MIT Press.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ling, C., AbuHilal, I., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Zannettou, S, Stringhini, G. (2021). Dissecting the Meme Magic: Understanding Indicators of Virality in Image Memes. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(1).
MacRae, I. (2021). Dark Social: Understanding the darker side of work, personality and social media. Bloomsbury.
McNamara, A. (2011). Can we measure memes? Frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience, 3.
Valensise, C.M., Serra, A., Galeazzi, A., Etta, G., Cinelli, M., Quattrociocchi, W. (2021). Entropy and complexity unveil the landscape of memes evolution. Scientific Reports, 11, Article number 20022.
