New information of a negative kind is the most obvious, such as the novelty of a new predator in the neighborhood. (If you think this doesn't still impress people, try the phrase "9-11.") But positive novelty is also important, beginning with new food sources or ways of getting food. We are curious creatures, as many creatures are, and among social creatures, new information that gets the attention of others provides identity and status.

There's also little doubt that humans (like other creatures) find certain qualities in the form of information-melody and rhyme for example-that may indicate some survival value as direct as making information easier to remember, and as indirect as that they cause pleasure, and pleasure has positive physical effects that can enhance survival and fitness for reproduction. And perhaps these qualities are akin to the burrs that encase seeds so the burrs will stick to animal fur and fall off on distant ground where the seeds propagate. But information doesn't come in catch-phrases and melodies. Corporations pay billions to have information crafted, shaped, formed in precisely the most infectious images, sounds and words that money can buy and, more to the point, human minds can devise, because they are trying very hard to do just that.

Some information---like push-button patriotic phrases, expressions of race hatred, or to some extent like the information in commercials and political persuasion-may bypass consciousness and go directly to the unconscious. (I suspect meme-meisters don't make this claim because "unconscious" is not a fashionable idea in their neighborhood.) Again, I find this terminology more useful, more fruitful, for contemplation, analysis and action (the action is: make it conscious and deal with it) than the blunt instrument of memes.

I could go on, but my box of memes is empty. Except for one more: I've concluded that memes make sense to extraverts, because extraverts are oriented towards information more fully formed from outside. So information would appear to them to be like an infection coming into a body. And since most people are extraverts, memes are a popular idea.

Intraverts have their own problems, but some-like being taken over like zombies (or patsies) by the belief that stock markets always go up, or believing in memes and selfish genes mostly because they're cute, fashionable, endlessly repeated, and the boss says so -we are immune to.