It’s hard to escape the meme of memetics. When Richard Dawkins first introduced the concept of a “unit of culture” that might, like actual genes, undergo both replication and mutation it’s likely that he didn’t foresee that the very meme of the meme would mutate into something wildly different when thrown into the fecund Petri dish of the global cultural milieu. I believe it is safe to assume that the majority of people who speak of memes do so in reference to its more debased meaning of “images and ideas spread on social media,” and these do fit neatly within the larger framework of the original concept.
Memetics has a varied reputation across academic fields. Writers – including Dawkins – have expanded on the idea, since its initial description only comprised a small part of the larger work in which it was born, The Selfish Gene. Memes, as Dawkins originally described them, represented a non-biological replicator to which Darwinian pressures might be applied. They would be another kind of playground to examine evolutionary concepts, and perhaps they weren’t just a concept but could actually influence behaviour.
From that first introduction in 1976, the idea has spread and changed. Other writers picked up on the concept and developed it further. Susan Blackmore and Richard Brodie have written on the topic, lauding it as a way to understand how ideas spread and change. The philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote of memes as well. Recall that in the early 2000s there was a highly popular movement called “New Atheism” and a group of particular authors including Dawkins and Dennett became known as the four-horsemen of Atheism.
Dawkins wrote further on memes, and it is in a volume titled Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind that he lays out the metaphorical case that I find troubling. His influential 1991 essay, Viruses of the Mind, opens the collection of essays, and compares religion unfavourably to both biological and computer viruses. The essay has been widely republished, shared, and debated, and really cemented the idea of a “mind virus” in the public discourse. Despite its utility and cosy simplicity, this metaphor is so wrong as to be destructive to any scientific potential memetics might hold for aspiring researchers into idea propagation.
I can certainly see why the idea has such appeal. Who among us does not have some friend or family member who picked up some notion or belief and changed their life’s focus or drastically changed their thinking afterwards? The nephew who suddenly becomes an evangelical preacher, the neighbour who seemingly overnight becomes a ranting advocate for the latest political conspiracy, the work colleague who can’t stop talking about their passion for the latest diet fad – these all fit this pattern of a person whose mind has been overcome by some compelling idea. Surely we have all seen radical behavioural changes in people we thought we knew that seem attributable to their encountering a particularly sticky idea or concept.
The metaphor of viral infection is a very tempting way to explain such rapid (and often seemingly detrimental) change, but ideas don’t simply hop into a host and take over. Something much more complex and interesting is going on and I hope to show that the simplistic metaphor of mind-virus is both inaccurate and pernicious.
Recently I wrote a paper for inclusion in a volume called Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous on the topic of how monster flaps are formed and spread. I spent a lot of time thinking and reading on the topic of memetics, for surely at some level the spread of stories of monsters is just another meme?
How do brains really process memes?
What truly happens when we are exposed to stories – or memes? Brain science is far from a full consensus for what consciousness is, and what brains do, but increasingly evidence supporting a non-dualistic explanation for brain functions seems at hand. I’m sure Dawkins doesn’t want to be described as a dualist, but his essay seems to be built on a very magical conception of how brains work. Metaphors like the “mind-virus” are effective because they fit into a framework of ideas we already understand, but poetical aptness is not ground truth.
Here’s a scenario to consider. Someone posts a meme online. Let’s say this is an image of a virus dressed as Marcel Marceau, a “mime virus” if you will.
Someone posts this to their social media timeline and the viewers in their network have many choices with what to do with this meme.
- The most common action, we might deduce, would be for the viewer to look at it but not take any action. This is the kind of meme that is sort of “dead on arrival.”
- Sometimes a meme will have more resonance with viewers and they will want to share the meme – in its unchanged form – by sharing it or liking it. Liking can increase the chance the algorithm will spread the meme to more viewers, but the viewer here needn’t be aware of that.
- Another portion of viewers will add their own comments when sharing the meme – a form of mutation, in the memetic sense, but leaving the image unchanged.
- Finally, some viewers will be inspired to take the original meme and either alter it or build their own fresh variants of the original. Each of these mutants, in turn, face the same selective pressures and might hit on some combination of images and concepts that really gets people fired up to share. We commonly call that “going viral.”
I’m convinced that the popularity of the phrase “going viral” has more to do with the common understanding that viruses undergo exponential growth than with any direct ties with Dawkins’ mind-virus concept, but regardless of how much careful consideration is applied to its use, the ubiquity of the phrase across the Internet inevitably promotes faith in the “mind-virus” metaphor as a literal truth. As I was preparing this essay, famously memeable billionaire Elon Musk claimed that the “woke mind virus” killed his child. (His child is not dead, and – as I hope to continue to demonstrate in this essay – whatever “wokeness” is, it’s not a virus of the mind.)
A history of mind-viruses
I couldn’t find many uses of the phrase “mind-virus” prior to the 1990s. Dawkins’ Virus of the Mind essay was published in 1993 as part of a collection of essays by multiple authors in the volume Dennett and his Critics: Demystifying Mind. He originally presented the paper at a conference in 1991, but had been making the “religion is a virus” claim in newspapers as early as 1990. Dawkins’ essay does explicitly discuss how computer viruses replicate, but it is clear from his tone that his intent in calling religion a “virus” is to be disparaging. He finishes out the essay by trying to explain that science, despite also being a memetic framework that involves copying and mutation, is not a virus because Dawkins sees it as a beneficent enterprise.
That approach has continued to be used in public discourse. Virality continues to be used as a general purpose term to express rapid spread of an idea, but mind-virus seems to be reserved as an epithet. Elon Musk in particular has used his X platform to talk about the “woke mind-virus” and the “extinctionist mind-virus“. He’s not alone.
The connotation is in the context. If the scientific method itself can “go viral” and spread culturally, then people who oppose the memeplex of science might well characterise it as a virus. Dawkins refutes the idea that science could be a mind-virus by dint of its efficacy and self-evident virtues (“testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu…”), but his litany of laudibility reeks of scientism. Science is a human endeavour and thus inevitably flawed in all the ways you would expect from any system designed by deluxe monkeys. Paradigmatic science should always be pushing towards evidence-based truths, but it has to be exercised through the human substrate and we’re inherently flawed executioners of higher values.
Mind-viruses aren’t just a Dawkins idea. Like memes, the mind-virus idea has left the lab and is mutating in the wild. They make an appearance in fiction, most notably in Neil Stephenson’s dystopian novel Snow Crash which hit bookshelves in 1992. In that book, a fictional mind-virus rewrites the software of the language-processing portion of a person’s brain and makes them extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation. Effectively, Stephenson’s fictional mind-virus does what Dawkins suggests religion can do in real life. Snow Crash is likely another vector for the promotion of the concept of a mind-virus because the book was very popular and influential among the Sci-Fi and Technology set.
Exactly when the idea of virality achieved linguistic ubiquity might be best indicated by when it starts showing up in trendy business books. One of the earliest examples I found was the 2001 book Unleashing the Ideavirus, which featured an introduction, appropriately enough, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point explicitly states in the introduction that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do”. Gladwell wants readers to think of the spread of ideas as being an epidemiological process. He argues that ideas spread slowly and then suddenly explode in growth when a tipping point is reached.
Mathematicians might see this as a poetic way to describe exponential growth. The parable of the “inventor of chess” and his gambit of requesting payment in the form of ever-doubling cereal grains on each square of a board as reward for his clever game design makes the same point about the power of exponents, but is much older. Gladwell’s epidemiology metaphor was very memetically effective. Discussing its effectiveness and reach within the context of an essay about how memes function risks a messy prose recursion, but suffice it to say that his contribution to the conceptual spread of virality is noteworthy.
If memes are not mind-viruses what are they?
Brain research has made big steps towards understanding how brains help us understand the world we’re experiencing. The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience is an excellent primer on the past few hundred years of the effort to decode what brains actually do when we think. That history includes many of the popular (but wrong) metaphors about our brains as steam engines, computers, telegraphy networks, and other popular technologies. Our brains are none of those things, though tempting parallels come along from time to time.
There are still many people who believe that our brains are just a physical substrate for some kind of ghostly intangible “something” that ideas are made of. Dualism has been a debate in brain science for as long as there has been “brain science.” We don’t even have a common definition of consciousness, so it’s impossible to get a united view of how it might function in a brain-based model of cognition. However, the past century of brain research seems to be converging on the idea that whatever the “mind” is, it’s happening within the structures of the human brain. This is where the “virus of the mind” metaphor becomes really problematic.
Despite there still being much uncertainty in the scientific effort to unravel the hows of brain function and consciousness, one particular book has led me to some tentative conclusions about a possible neurological structure underlying beliefs. Jeff Hawkins, whose commercial work in information technology led to the Palm Pilot, wrote On Intelligence back in 2004. He spends much time explaining the physical structure of how brains build predictive models eventually posits what he calls the memory-prediction framework. I won’t do you the disservice of trying to cogently explain in a paragraph or two what he spends an entire book laying out, but the big take-away is that he believes that much of what the neocortex does is to try and predict what is going to happen next by means of building connection structures that form a feedback network.
Even if it turned out that Hawkins’ theory is wrong in the specifics, it made me think about the kinds of abstract modelling we do beyond simple motor control activities like catching a ball or driving a car. When one initially takes up such activities it is very difficult and takes a lot of attention; but over time, we build something in our brains that we recognise as expertise or learning. What struck me during this research was that we’re perfectly aware that it takes time to learn a new skill, but there’s a broad cultural assumption that beliefs can be instantly changed with a good argument.
But what if beliefs are just another kind of predictive model built on the slow accretion of connected neural cells? That would imply that belief, like any mental competency, requires the development of a neural structure to hold it. It might seem odd to think of beliefs as the same sort of cognitive structure as learning to type or how to bake bread or perform math calculations, but beliefs do become models we test reality against. The person who believes in the plate-tectonics model of earth movement and the person who believes earthquakes are divine punishment from an angry deity both have a model of the world that explains real world experiences. Scientific models change as required by evidence and religious models tend to resist change through special pleading when reality doesn’t match expectations – but both are models of the way the world works. And as models they exist both in abstractions captured in writing and words, but also as neural correlates in the minds of those who have accepted them.
It takes time to learn these models. They don’t change quickly unless there is already a ready framework of supportive beliefs in place. The simple reality is that adult minds are not generally susceptible to ideas the way that the mind-virus explanation implies. With the caveat that I’m talking of adult minds, let’s get back to my argument.
If memes are not viruses, and we’re not susceptible to quick takeover by invasive memes, then what is the value of the “virus of the mind” meme itself other than as a pejorative against memes we don’t like? If science is pushing towards a materialist model of what the brain is doing and is able to explain learning through structures within the brain, then treating ideas as though they were free-floating viruses that can infect us against our will is a kind of magical thinking.
In On Intelligence, Hawkins did not say that beliefs are just another predictive model. That was my own conclusion after reading back before 2014. However, I was excited to see that in his newest book, A Thousand Brains, he explicitly speaks of belief as just another kind of brain model. Beliefs, just like other predictive models, are built from networks of cortical columns within the neo-cortex. In chapter 12, which deals with false beliefs, Hawkins speaks to ideas (memes) that have a high degree of virality. He outlines through several examples (flat earth, vaccine denial, and religion) how an idea can be designed to be easily reproduced with a high degree of fidelity even if it is factually incorrect, and he explicitly invokes Dawkins creation of memes. However, it is also clear that Hawkins does not believe ideas are mind viruses. His work extensively describes the process of building new models and they must be integrated with existing frameworks of beliefs.
Ideas that do seem to pop with a high degree of virality are of special interest to many skeptics and remain quite mysterious. From fads to mass psychogenic illness to yawning, it’s clear that some ideas do spread rapidly across a population but this is uncommon, unpredictable, and usually not the sort of long term behavioural change that a change in belief would have on an individual. The very ephemeral nature of these exceptional phenomena is baked into our word “fad.”
Of course the irony is not lost on me that the introduction to A Thousand Brains is written by Richard Dawkins. That he could read Hawkins and not see how it undermines his mind-virus metaphor would be shocking if it weren’t the sort of thing that all of us do every day when we ignore contradictory evidence that would make us question our hard-won and comfortable predictive model structures (beliefs). However, Dawkins’ memes fit well within Hawkins’ framework and the last few chapters of the book speak much to the preservation of memes across time in a way that echoes The Selfish Gene. Thankfully, we don’t have to accept ideas (or beliefs) uncritically. That’s core to the skeptic’s favourite tool: critical thinking. I’m willing to accept the metaphorical virality of memes without accepting the existence of invasive mind-viruses.
Our bodies invest a lot of work in constructing these neural models, and I am inferring that anything costly to create probably has built-in tools to defend it. Could our species’ vast number of biases be the result of our bodies trying to conserve the expenditure that was used to craft our network of models? Perhaps.
It’s a complex topic that I’m deeply interested in, but one that mostly lies outside the path of my professional career. Yet, I think that if the above is correct, it suggests what we all know on some deeper level: It takes time to change a belief.
If the predictive model idea is correct and also my deduction that beliefs are built from physical neural structures, and if we’re biologically incentivised to protect these structures, then the metaphor of a mind-virus that can sweep in and rewrite us into doing entirely new behaviours is just wrong.
In Dawkins’ essay, he claims that faith-based thinking is like a “bad” virus but that science is not a virus in the same way that “good” computer programs aren’t viruses. But both faith and science are learned clusters of ideas and behaviours. The distinction in labelling is derived from a subjective evaluation of their merits, not from a fundamental difference in their substrate. If memetics is right, they’re both memeplexes and subject to the same Darwinian selective pressures.
But, like the word meme, the mind-virus idea has itself spread and mutated and been widely absorbed with new and different meanings. I find the mind-virus metaphor troubling in ways beyond its inaccuracy. But it does suggest that not only do we want to protect our own extant brain models from outside conflicting ones, but that we guard them so closely we want to ensure our wider culture also is protected. “I don’t like that idea, so for the safety of everyone in my tribe we need to suppress it,” is a conversation played out millions of times a day on social media.
The mind-virus approach to religion implies that because faiths and mythology are not built out of rational evidence-based frameworks, they’re pernicious and worthless and dangerous. Or that everyone involved is a duped host of a parasitic memeplex. And — thanks to our brain’s tendency to prefer confirmatory evidence that makes us feel good — it’s easy for non-theists to think of examples where terrible things have happened because of organised religions, and to disregard the times people have been harmed by science.
Why do some ideas spread so widely? It’s safe to say that nobody – so far – knows the answer to this question. If they did, then advertising would be far more efficacious than merely ubiquitous. Finding an idea that everyone simply has to spread is the Holy Grail of a multi-billion dollar industry and if they haven’t got it down to a replicable science, perhaps this is another indicator that ideas aren’t “viruses.”
Molecular memetics
So what metaphors do work more accurately here, but without the cultural baggage inherent in sexual reproduction or disease-based analogies? I’ve turned to the field of chemistry for my answer.
In chemistry a few concepts may be helpful for discussing how ideas spread. First, I think some ideas tend to be elemental rather than molecular. Such ideas are like the noble gasses. They are clearly recognisable and don’t mutate much when they spread. Simple ideas that maintain this elemental purity are popular for brand identity, core religious principles, mathematical concepts, and so forth.
But some ideas really seem to spark a creative storm of mixing and remixing. These ideas have what I’d call a high memetic valence. In chemistry a high valence means that an atom has a high combinatorial power due to its abundance of free electrons. In memes, a high memetic-valence means that an idea has a high degree of combinatorial power. I can’t say with confidence why some ideas have high memetic-valence, but clearly some ideas really spark a creative reaction in large portions of the population, while others do not.
Memes can exist extra corpus in many forms, but when a meme enters our minds it has to fit within these neural structures to be processed. Again, I’m no dualist, so my point here is that when we learn things, they’re happening in a biological framework and are not loosey-goosey floating around in the ether.
The process — the biological process — of incorporating memes into our brain is far more complex than our simplistic metaphors. While viruses do capture the exponential concept of idea-spread, they do so at the expense of the fascinating internal struggle that must be happening as we all try to integrate such ideas into brains already fortified with predictive models.
