The Meme Machine

TAKING THE MEME’S EYE VIEW 41
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