The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think

A 2002 monograph by the anthropologist Robert Aunger. It treats the meme as a physical object, a pattern of electrical charge in the brain, and not as a figure of speech.

Aunger describes memes as patterns that reproduce rapidly in a node of the brain, and uses that account to look at free will, human identity, consciousness and society. Free Press published it in New York with 392 pages, a bibliography and an index. The Library of Congress files it under memetics, social perception, and thought and thinking.

Aunger is a biological anthropologist and senior lecturer in evolutionary public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Cambridge and University College London. He edited Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science and wrote Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved with Valerie Curtis.