The Meme Machine

44 THE MEME MACHINE
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 nth 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 just she made feeble attempts to get her
nose up to where I was holding the dish. Then, in a process called shaping, I