Neurons as memes: researchers extract a 31-meme 'genome' from 80 years of Batman in Qwen3-8B
kieranklaassen · x · 2026-10-22
Mike Taylor recounts leaving the 50-person marketing agency he built, self-publishing a memetics book only 200 people read, and why memetics never became a science: memes couldn't be measured. Working with Claude Opus 5.5, he turned the idea testable — defining a meme as whatever makes a single LLM neuron fire.
Key results from the paper 'Language-model neurons as units of cultural inheritance in 80 years of Batman':
- Recording 884,736 neuron poles in Qwen3-8B across Wikipedia plot summaries of 32 Batman works (1943–2022), 13 literary/superhero relatives, and 69 ordinary films; merging neurons firing on the same sentences yields 14,843 meme families, with 56 forming a core canon present in ≥29/32 works — absent in random pseudo-franchises.
- Three pre-registered experiments: heredity holds in both models (adaptations carry their source comic's optional units above chance; exact p = 0.0026 and 0.00017, robust in 99.6% of 30,240 specifications); plain word overlap finds sources as well as neurons, and the 'beyond words' test fails for Qwen (p = 0.09–0.25) but passes for Llama 3.1 8B (p = 0.010–0.033); identity is not supported — name-free canon separates Batman from ordinary stories (AUC 0.90–0.95) but not from masked-hero films.
- The heatmap plots 31 named memes (origin wound, secret identity, the Joker, the Batcave, Commissioner Gordon...) across 80 years of works.
The first empirical demonstration of LLM neurons as units of cultural inheritance — turning unfalsifiable memetics into a measurable research program.
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