Memes have often divided readers into tiers - those who know or understand something, and those who don’t. One of the predecessors and close cousins of these brain memes is an image macro known as “layers of irony,” a four-panel comic that follows a set form, always beginning with a disembodied head that one can only describe as “very vaporwave” asking, “how many layers of irony are you on?” The idea here is that being ironic online has no upper bound, that there is always another layer of irony to enfold oneself inside. From there, iteration changed the brain meme from one about intelligence and pretension to one about the very nature of argument itself. Just as using “whom” instead of “who” makes one sound exponentially smarter, “whomst’d’ve” makes you sound like an omega-level mutant capable of warping reality with your powerful brain.
The “Expanding Brain,” so far the most popular of the “levels of intelligence” genre of meme, is an image macro that uses New Age depictions of what happens inside your skull to show the difference between sheeple and the truly enlightened - from ordinary brain to universe-enfolding Vitruvian Man.īrain memes, like the Wojak variant, have their origin in the “ Whomst” progression, an escalating, ridiculous series of not-quite-words that make someone sound smarter. Since then, the idea of ever-evolving intelligence has itself evolved, spreading across the memescape from Tumblr and 4chan to Twitter, in the form of what has become known as the “Expanding Brain” meme. Because this is how they communicate with one another, the channers and Tumblr bloggers bragged in the form of memes: smart-sounding but nonsensical linguistic escalations, from “who” to “whom” to “whomst,” and depictions of a character known as Feels Guy, or Wojak, who has a comically large brain images that demonstrated the intelligence of whoever wielded said images. A few weeks ago, posters on 4chan and Tumblr began bragging - ironically, sort of, as all things on 4chan and Tumblr are - about the size of their brains.