Memes — Be aware of them.

It is a common notion that ideas are the product of our biological brain and humans create ideas. But what if it’s vice-versa that ideas control us and we are just the medium.

In 1976 Richard Dawkins coined a term meme. A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other phenomena.

As you read this, you become a host for a meme. This meme infects your brain like a parasite and its chance of feeding on you highly depends on the cluster of memes that are already feeding on you. You might take this parasite on a ride or starve it to death by not further letting it replicate. Memes are like living structure.

Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” writes “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”

Every second knowingly or unknowingly we are digesting tonnes of information through digital media, social networks, books, youtube. This ever-flowing information is like parasites that feed on our brain and we further play our role in imitating those ideas (memes) through the available means. These cluster of memes envelopes our life and evolves with time either by creating content, reading a book, watching movie or video on youtube we are letting memes feed and reproduce.

We did not choose evolution, evolution was the way of survival and reproduction. Just as genes propagate itself in the gene pool, similarly, meme evolves itself in the meme pool. Presently a numerous number of memes are propagating themselves through 7 billion hosts and competing for their survival.

According to Richard Dawkins, the key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but memes replicating thought from person to person using imitation. In the book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes and longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.

Historical evidence of ideas or knowledge as some sort of meme comes from how Vedas originated. Vedas are ancient text comprising of texts constituting the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature. Vedas come from the word vid which means “to know”. Vedas are described as “authorless” or “not from man” and for generations, the Vedas have been transferred via an oral tradition using means of remembering the hymns (also known as srutis) until those were compiled into 4 written texts.

This makes a case of the meme as how information or knowledge that is believed to be “not from man” got imitated for thousands of year and humans were just a vehicle of carrying and replicating that knowledge.

So are memes harmful? It’s hard to predict if a meme will be toxic, but we can identify which ones have been toxic by their effects on the hosts and the world in the past. We, humans, are driven by core memes of beliefs and identities. Our actions are driven by the expression of memes and genes.

If you think you are in control, it’s just another meme being expressed and spread. Memetic information follows the path of least resistance. Lazy memes have an edge over hard to digest memes.

Memes also get replicated inside our thoughts by creativity. Creativity is an evolutionary process inside the brain used to decode memes from behavior or symbols and reconstruct them. Human memes are rarely copied via imitation but mostly copied via reconstruction of the meaning through Creativity.

This article is also a meme, specifically a meme that makes you aware of memes.

Be aware of them.