Memes that aren’t there

The human brain is a meme-recognition machine. It has been an evolutionary advantage to overreact to what ‘looks like’ a tiger moving in the bushes, even if that means sometimes seeing tigers where there are none. This tendency to see patterns that aren’t really there led us to anthropomorphism – attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities like animals – which appeared in the art of early humans 40,000 years ago. As this coincided with the emergence of more systematic hunting practices, it’s hypothesised this practice allowed hunters to identify empathetically with the animals they hunted in order to better predict their movements.

Early religions were heavily anthropomorphic, assigning human form, characteristics and behaviors to deities, a misfiring of our meme-recognition machinery in a vain attempt to make sense of the world around them. Traditional fables from around the world included proud lions (Aesop’s fables), clever rabbits (the Panchatantra) and trickster spiders (Akan folklore). Anthropomorphism forms the basis of many of our most popular stories to this day, in works as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pixar’s success in the box office is partly driven by asking what would happen if toys, monsters, cars, and other inanimate objects had human-like feelings. This mechanism frequently misfires, resulting in Pareidolia – people seeing images of dogs in clouds, faces on the surface of Mars, or Virgin Mary in their grilled cheese sandwiches.

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