McNamara Adam
Department of Psychology, University of Surrey Surrey, UK.
Front Evol Neurosci. 2011 May 25;3:1. doi: 10.3389/fnevo.2011.00001. eCollection 2011.
Memes are the fundamental unit of cultural evolution and have been left upon the periphery of cognitive neuroscience due to their inexact definition and the consequent presumption that they are impossible to measure. Here it is argued that although a precise definition of memes is rather difficult it does not preclude highly controlled experiments studying the neural substrates of their initiation and replication. In this paper, memes are termed as either internally or externally represented (i-memes/e-memes) in relation to whether they are represented as a neural substrate within the central nervous system or in some other form within our environment. It is argued that neuroimaging technology is now sufficiently advanced to image the connectivity profiles of i-memes and critically, to measure changes to i-memes over time, i.e., as they evolve. It is argued that it is wrong to simply pass off memes as an alternative term for "stimulus" and "learnt associations" as it does not accurately account for the way in which natural stimuli may dynamically "evolve" as clearly observed in our cultural lives.
模因是文化进化的基本单位，但由于其定义不精确以及由此产生的它们无法测量的假设，一直处于认知神经科学的边缘。本文认为，尽管给模因下一个精确的定义相当困难，但这并不妨碍进行高度可控的实验来研究其产生和复制的神经基础。在本文中，根据模因是在中枢神经系统中以神经基质的形式呈现，还是在我们环境中的其他某种形式呈现，模因被分为内部表征模因（i-模因）或外部表征模因（e-模因）。有人认为，神经成像技术现在已经足够先进，能够对i-模因的连接图谱进行成像，关键是能够测量i-模因随时间的变化，即它们的进化过程。有人认为，简单地将模因当作“刺激”和“习得联想”的替代术语是错误的，因为它没有准确地解释自然刺激在我们文化生活中明显观察到的动态“进化”方式。
