The Meme Machine

46 THE MEME MACHINE
What about emotions? Emotions are an inextricable part of human life and
even play a key role in rational thought and decision making. The neurologist
Antonio Damasio (1994) has worked with many patients who have brain
damage, often in the frontal lobe, that causes them to lose their normal
emotional responses and become emotionally flat. Far from turning into superrational
decision-makers, able to plan their lives without all the irritating
distraction of unwanted emotions, they become almost paralysed with
indecision. Whether to choose pickle and pumpkin crisps, or cheese and onion,
can become a nerve-racking dilemma to be resolved only by long and careful
thought, and a normal life becomes impossible. Most of us would just think
‘well, I feel like cheese and onion today’ not realising that the emotions have
done the complex work of juggling the possible consequences, weighing up the
results of past experiences, throwing these in with species-specific preferences
and coming up with some rough and ready bodily reaction that allows that tiny
verbal part of our brain to say ‘I think I will have the cheese and onion please –
if you don’t want it’. Star Trek’s Mr Data is simply implausible. If he truly had
no feelings he would not be able to decide whether to get up in the morning,
when to speak to Captain Picard, or whether to drink tea or coffee.
Emotions and thought are intimately linked in other ways too. There are
rather few hormones, such as adrenaline and noradrenaline, that control
emotional states, but we can experience a vast array of different emotions
according to how we interpret and label our physiological responses. In this way
you could say that memes come to be involved in our emotions, but are
emotions memes? The answer is – only if they can be transmitted to someone
else by imitation.
It is almost a truism to say ‘you can’t possibly know how I’m feeling’.
Emotions are private and notoriously difficult to communicate. We write
poems, give roses, and paint pictures to try in some small way, to communicate
them. We might, of course, pick up an emotion from someone else, and this
certainly looks like imitation, as when tears of sadness spring up in response to
seeing another’s grief. This contagious spread of behaviour looks like imitation
because one person does something and then another person does the same
thing. But strictly speaking it is not. To understand why we need to define
imitation.