Love is a meme. The Beatles made great music is a meme. Smart clothes is a meme. Smart is a meme. Clothes is a meme. Depression, as a description of a weather system, is a meme. Weather system is a meme. Weather is a meme. System is a meme. Depression, as a description of a mental state, is a meme. Mental is a meme. State is a meme. Schema is a meme. Meme is a meme.
And, if you take this in and believe it, then meme is one of your schemas!
Schemas and memes are arguably two reflectors of the same concept - ideas! (from the instinctive and unspoken structural to the metaphysical abstract) - in different contexts. The theories around both terms emphasise the enormous impact of ideas upon the human psyche.
A schema can be defined as any cognitive structure or encoded packet of infomation in the mind-brain. A meme is a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is contained in a medium of communication - eg: a book - or is transmitted verbally or by repeated action (behaviour) from one mind to another.
Unfortunately, despite their importance to understanding how humans make sense of and interact with the world, there is a lot of confusion about 'memes' and 'schemas'.
Some of this has been created by the *experts* themselves! More often than not schema is seen as internal. Yet Michael Eysenck & Cara Flanagan have talked about 'culturally-transmitted schemas' - in other words, memes. Dr Susan Blackmore, arguably the world's leading proponent of Memetics (the study of how memes are transmitted between people as virus-type 'infections' of the mind), has argued that memes are internalised in the brain as neurobiological structures - in other words, they become schemas.
So are the terms interchangable? The answer is: not entirely. There are situations where schemas exist internally in someone's thoughts and and are never transmitted out (via speech or behaviours such as writing) to become external memes; and there are containers for memes independent of the human brain - eg: unread books.
How one individual's schemas become memes, infect others and change the schematic structures in the recipients' mind-brains is a key component in understanding how people persuade each other and how both Informational and Normative Social Influence are created.
The criticality of schemas
Kant argued that schemas interdigitate between properties of the mind (the a priori categories ) and raw sensory data (of a posteriori experience). "This representation of a universal procedure of the imagination in providing an image for a concept, I entitle the schema of the concept."
Leading early 20th Century British neurologists, Sir Henry Head & Gordon Morgan Holmes, established structural biological bases for schemas in the brain; and Jean Paiget, the pioneering child developmentalist, conceived the idea of a biologial schema developing through interaction with the external environment. The concept of the schema in contemporary Cognitive science is perhaps most directly traceable to the work of British Cognitive psychologist Sir Fredrick Bartlett. Bartlett, a onetime student of Head, was interested in memory, and in particular in the notion that the context of an experience had crucial effects on what was retained and how well this was recalled. From his famous 'War of the Ghosts' experiments, Bartlett saw a schema as a component of memory which is formed from encounters with the environment, and which organizes information in specific ways.
From Bartlett's work, schema theory has become keystone in explaining how we represent literally everything to ourselves - at both conscious and unconscious levels. The subsequent work of Dr Aaron Beck has become particularly important in demonstrating how maladaptive schemas - those which don't represent reality and can lead us to try to functon off distorted views of ourselves and others - can result in personality disorders, most especially Depression. (For further information on this line of thinking, see 'Can vMEMES cause Clinical Depresson?'
Schemas are incredibly powerful in influencing what we think, how we feel and what we do.
The spread of memes
In contrast to the relatively-long history of the 'schema', the 'meme' was only invented in 1976 for Richard Dawkins' book, 'The Selfish Gene'. However, the study of the meanings used in communication in a culture has been at the heart of Symbolic Interactionism since its foundings in the 1920s.
Dawkins was postulating the idea of a second replicator - ideas which beget ideas - following the first replicator of Evolutionary Theory - genes. (Hence, memes rhyming with genes.) From Dawkins' ideas came the neo-science of Memetics.
Others - not least Susan Blackmore! - have taken Dawkins' ideas much further, especially in terms of developing Evolutionary Psychology.
One of the key ideas Blackmore has put forward, to reduce it to basics, is that the infection (input) of ever more complex ideas and the need to digest and work with such ideas has, over many millennia of time, driven the evolution of the human brain. In other words, bigger ideas require bigger brains. This ties in with but extends exponentially Professor Tim Crow's theory that the acquisition of language was the real driver in the development of brain size and human intelligence.
When Dr Don Beck & Chris Cowan developed Spiral Dynamics from the
work of
Dr Clare Graves
, they used the term 'vMEMES' for the distinctive and systematic core ways of thinking Graves had identified. They saw vMEMES (or Value Memes) as the organisers or attractors of memes. So, for example, the B-O PURPLE vMEME will relate to ideas about safety and belonging, C-P RED will favour concepts about power and self-expression...and so on.
This reflected Graves' original thinking, though he used themas for the systems he identified and schemas for the cognitive concepts which related to each thema.
To avoid confusion, it is proposed in Integrated SocioPsychology that the external idea - how ever contained and transmitted - is considered to be the meme and that the idea embedded biologically inside a person is the schema.
