âSillyâ or a secret wellness weapon? Your brain on memes
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The worldâs finest thinkers have tried for centuries to get to the bottom of why we laugh. Freud thought we do it in order to release pent-up nervous energy. Plato said itâs a manifestation of feeling superior to the misfortune of others, or an earlier form of ourselves. âThe ridiculous,â said Plato, âis a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice.â
Plato wouldnât have approved, but memes like this have been the secret wellness-boosting weapon for many, over the last year.
“It became this sort of collective movement, ‘Look how s. this is’.” Was she into memes before Covid-19 hit? “Hardly ever,” says my friend, echoing my feeling. “But, in terms of a coping mechanism, misery loves company. In the two seconds it took me to flick it across to you, you’d laugh and we’d feel this collective pain, and dark humour, that was having a moment of solidarity even though we couldn’t see each other.” We were far from alone. While memes are nothing new - the term comes from the Greek word “mimeme”, meaning “gene”, or ideas that spread through a culture - they’ve flourished in unexpected ways since Covid-19 hit.
Holocaust Survivor and renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl created a new form of psychotherapy after his release from the camps called Logo. - Religion & Spirituality myTake