The Meme Machine

THREE PROBLEMS WITH MEMES 55
work survive into an age of mass communication – then his four notes can be
heard and remembered by literally billions of people. I am sorry if you are one
of them and now are not able to get these four notes out of your mind.
This problem – why can’t I get that tune out of my mind – provides a good
example of memetics at work, and I shall use it to show that the size of the unit
makes no difference.
Why do tunes sometimes just go round and round in my head and will not go
away? Why do we have the sort of brains that do that? What possible use is it
for me to spend all day singing ‘Coke Refreshes you Best’, or the theme tune
from Neighbours? The answer from memetics is that it is no use at all to me –
but it is of use to the memes.
Memes are replicators and if they can get themselves copied they will. The
imitating machinery of the brain is an excellent environment for copying tunes.
So if a tune is memorable enough to get lodged in your brain and then passed on
again then it will – and if it is really memorable, or singable, or playable, it will
get into a lot of brains. If it turns out to be just what some TV producer needs to
start her latest soap opera then it will get into even more brains, and every time
you start humming it there is a chance that someone else will hear you and you
still set them off. Meanwhile, plenty of other tunes are never heard again. The
consequence of all this is that the successful ones increase in the meme pool at
the expense of the others. We all get infected with them and they are stored in
our memories, ever ready to be activated and passed on to anyone who has not
got them yet. All this singing is not for our benefit, nor for our genes’ benefit.
Being haunted by horrible tunes is just an inevitable consequence of having
brains that can imitate tunes.
Note that this argument works regardless of all the specific reasons why one
piece of music may be singable or likeable and another not. Those reasons
might include, for example, innate preferences for certain sounds, the pleasure to
be found in predictability and unpredictability of sounds, or overall complexity.
Gatherer (1997) has explored the development of jazz in terms of the
adaptiveness of its component parts, looking at complexity, memorability and
the effect of the available technology at different times. Simple melodies are
easy to remember but may not be interesting enough for people to pass on.
Complex improvised music can evolve but may only survive in a community of
trained musicians and listeners, while even more complex music may be simply
too difficult to remember and so fail to be replicated, even if it can be enjoyed.
Memetics in the future may discover what makes for successful replication in
music. It may find out how different kinds of music fill different niches, such as