Memy w pamięci: jak wyśledzić memy w mózgu

Abstract

Despite 40 years of discussion the concept of memes still raises numerous controversies. Main problems are: the characteristics of memes as biological and cultural phenomenons; demarcation of events that are memes and aren’t memes; neurophysiologic background of meme existence and informational capacity of memes, and as a consequence of those problems - inconsistent terminology. Prerequisite condition of memes’ existence is a fixation of them in the memory. Memory, as a neurophysiologic event, is based on: mechanisms of stimuli encoding, stimuli summation, structural and functional modifications of neurons, and further modifications of the connection force within the neuronal networks. There are (among several existing) three basic paradigms of these processes: the Pavlov-Skinner’s model of stimuli reinforcement, Hebbian model of synapse weight and Squire’s standard model of memory consolidation. These mechanisms allow explaining the neuronal background of both, declarative and procedural memory, which are distinguished by E. Tulving. Researches on cognitive processes with functional brain imaging techniques suggest the possibility to identify neuronal representations of memes, being specific pattern detectors or gnostic units postulated by D. Hebb and J. Konorski. Possibly, neuroanatomic representations of them are cortical minicolumns. Information transfer within the cultural and cognitive processes involve permanent signal encoding and transcoding. The mechanism of neural stimuli encoding (topographic, frequency and chemical codes of the brain) are sufficiently recognized for the purposes of memetic explanations. The results of neuroimaging of topographic localization of words (ideas) within the human brain cortex suggest, that basic rules of neurobiology may be involved in the memetic processes. These are namely: the rule of topographic representation and the rule of contrast increase/ amplification. Revised characteristic of memetic events should involve the description of encoding processes and motivation and emotional mechanisms of memory as the crucial conditions of meme acquisition, propagation and evolution, within the meme life-cycle.