Something is stuck in my head.
I woke up this morning with an earworm in my head. Unfortunately, it is just a musical phrase and I can’t figure out the song it comes from. I learned recently that this comes from creating a musical phrase that doesn’t complete, and our brains hang on to it trying to figure it out, but we keep looping back to the beginning. This is a method that musicians (and advertisers) frequently use to deliberately keep us thinking about the song or product. If I hum it someone else in my family might pick it up and start humming it too. Because we can have these influences on each other, we are not as independent as we think.
The ”Individual” is an illusion.
A curious thing about American culture is the expectation to be an individual when we are social creatures. We are influenced and impacted by those around us in obvious and not so obvious ways. In high school I was baffled by the goths, it was like they so wanted to stand out, but the heavy black makeup and black clothes were just a different sort of uniform. They all went around brooding, being moody and talking about death. And I think a circular event happened here. The group was probably self-selecting in a sense, people who had a melancholy temperament were more attracted to others who had similar temperaments. And the “rules” of being in the group reinforced the patterns of being brooding and dark, bringing these attributes forward more in individuals who belonged to the group. In this way the more “depressive” or down regulated emotional states were contagious.
Contagious doesn’t have to be a bad word.
We tend to think of infections as only being physical, bacteria or viruses that we catch from others. With the belief that we can prevent infection with proper hygiene. But what about social contagions? And the idea that not everything that is contagious is negative. The word “contagion” comes from a root that means “to touch.” Laughter is contagious. Watching a comedy movie is much better with a group of friends. Hilarious memes need to be shared!
We tend to think of memes today as an internet phenomenon. Something that picked up somewhere in the 2000s, but memes have been around for a long time. (Probably as long as there have been groups of humans…) Richard Dawkings coined the word “meme” in 1976! He compared it to being like idea genes. Ideas looked to reproduce, replicate and evolve. As a pre-internet kid I heard and used the phrase “So long, Charley!” This phrase goes back to a 1938 horse race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Seabiscuit won the race and as he was passing the other horse his jockey called out, “so long, Charley!” to the other jockey, whose name was Charles. Of course, I used this phrase long before I had the context and I didn’t know it came from horse racing until much later when I read a book about Seabiscuit.
“Bye, Felicia” has a similar more dismissive air to it. This comes from a 1995 movie titled Friday, but reached meme status much later when a YouTube clip from the movie was uploaded. And then it did its meme thing and grew and expanded until it became known by people like me who never watched the movie or the TV show it spawned.
So why am I even thinking about this? The “so long, Charley” phrase popped into my head as I was moving past my daughter in the kitchen the other day. And I noticed it. As I was thinking about it, “Bye, Felicia” popped into my head. This is one aspect of mindfulness, paying attention to what you are thinking and where it came from. Sometimes I will notice something I’m thinking and trace it back. The connections are fascinating, and sometimes quite divergent. This is part of having a gifted/creative brain print. My brain often links things that don’t seem related on the surface in a way that demonstrates there is some sort of relationship.
Say what you meme
Another thing I’m thinking about is how memes give us a way to communicate, or augment communications. I’m on a Discord server for a non-profit therapy agency I do some volunteer work for. Sometimes I just watch how my colleagues interact. Someone will post something like celebrating achieving a milestone and several visual/textual memes might pop up in response. It’s a way of being connected at a distance. It can also add nuance and emotion to text-based interactions.
Memes and neurodivergence
For some neurodivergent people memes and snippets of canned communication memorized from media is how they learn to communicate: following scripts. When used as the only form of interaction it comes across as awkward, but even neurotypical people use little images and scripts to communicate all the time. When I met my husband, we were having some conversation and I tossed in a line from a sitcom “There is an emergency going on.” My husband immediately responded with “it is still going on.” It was a very quick way to let me know that we had a cultural touch point and we both knew the same show. It is like the way people from secret societies used to recognize each other by using some phrase only known to the group. If the other completes the phrase, then they are in the know. If they take it somewhere else, then the first person knows not to divulge sensitive information to the other person.
We do this with jargon all the time too. Each specialized group develops its own language full of terms that are only known to the “initiated.” I used some therapy jargon earlier in this article when I referred to “down regulated emotional states.” Jargon is also used as social signaling to state that a person has specialized knowledge. I can talk about down and up regulated states and attachment styles all day long, but as soon as my husband and son start talking computer programming, I lose track of the conversation!
What does it all meme?
Communication is layered, nuanced and complex. Memes are ways of adding those layers and adding play and enjoyment (or sometimes annoyment…) to our communications. We are influenced by our environment and those around us. Sometimes even the things that seem like they are just us—like that song stuck in my head, come from somewhere else.
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