A neuroscientist explains how Taylor Swift hijacks your brain and what it means for Trump

If you’re reading this, it is likely that Taylor Swift has hijacked your brain.

Don’t worry — you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans have also recently had their cognitive system invaded by the same mental contagion. If you enjoy her music, this might be a pleasurable infection. If her tunes grate on your nerves, the constant activation of your Taylor Swift neurons could be a curse.

But your personal pleasure or suffering is not the only reason we should be interested in Taylor Swift’s global influence. Why? Because whether we realize it, her influence will likely play a significant role in the 2024 presidential election. America’s sweetheart, who is dating one of the biggest stars of football — a sport that commands the unwavering devotion of red America — will likely be supporting Democratic President Joe Biden rather than Republican Donald Trump.

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This undoubtedly has Trump sweating. Hours before the kickoff of Super Bowl LVIII, the former posted a message on his social media platform Truth Social, taking credit for a bill that he claims made Swift so much money and should cause her to be indebted to him. Trump also predicted there’s “no way” Swift “could endorse Crooked Joe Biden.”

Trump’s desperate plea makes it clear that Swift’s decision of who to endorse is a big deal. If Election 2024 is close, as expected, the Swifties of the United States could theoretically tip the scales.

The key to understanding Swift’s growing influence, from a scientific view, is understanding how she has become a meme, and one of unparalleled viral power.

In a world saturated with social media content and trends, the term "meme" has slipped into common vernacular, often evoking silly or clever images that have gone viral. But the original concept of a meme, as proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is a well-known scientific framework for understanding cultural phenomena, including the meteoric rise of Taylor Swift. Dawkins introduced the term in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, not to explain digital trends per se, but to describe a unit of cultural transmission.

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A meme, in its original conception, is an idea, behavior, trend or philosophy that spreads from person to person within a culture. It is the cultural counterpart to the biological gene, often defined as a replicator of cultural information. Memetics, the mental counterpart to genetics, is the academic field that studies how memes propagate, evolve and affect societies.

Cultural transmission refers to the way in which information is passed along within a community, not through genetic inheritance but through communication and imitation. Every time a Taylor Swift song gets played on the radio, an Instagram reel, or sung by someone on the subway, the Swift meme is being propagated through our society.

Virality is a meme's ability to spread rapidly and widely from one individual to another, often through the internet. Adaptation, in memetics, involves a meme's change over time to fit its cultural environment better, enhancing its survival and propagation. Every time Swift’s cultural relevance begins to wane, she reinvents herself to adapt to a changing culture — and you can be sure her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce was another way to do just that. This doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t genuine. It simply means that Swift’s decisions about her love life and her career cannot be disentangled from her role as a vehicle for cultural trends.

Lastly, social contagion is the phenomenon by which ideas and behaviors are transmitted through social networks, echoing the way diseases spread. Swift's ascent to stardom can be likened to the spread of a mental virus, an idea that found fertile ground in the hearts and minds of millions, then spreads and replicates easily.

The Swift meme thrives because it taps into universal themes — love, heartache, growth, resilience — while also embodying the specific zeitgeist of our times. For Swifties, it offers a mirror in which they see their own struggles and triumphs reflected. In this reflection, they find connection, and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. This is the essence of social contagion and why certain memes, like Swift's songs and persona, become embedded in the collective psyche.

Recently, though, the Swift meme has transcended Swifties and pierced the collective consciousness of America more generally, as can be seen by this data from Google trends that plots the popularity of her name since 2004. Notice the exponential growth that has occurred in just the last few months as she criss-crossed the world on her Eras Tour and cheered boyfriend Kelce during his months-long run to victory earlier this month in Super Bowl LVIII.

In the two weeks since the Super Bowl, a flurry of over-the-top articles have been published that demonstrate the shocking virulence of the Swift meme. In an article that appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine, an esteemed professor of literature argued that Taylor Swift should be taught alongside Shakespeare. The professor went as far as to say that attending a Swift concert had been “one of the best nights of [his] life.”

A New Yorker article called “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison” was also recently published, with teaser text that says, “Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.” What is interesting is not just the stories of grown men who have caught the Swift bug, but the media outlets that are all publishing Swift stories, which have been virtually all of them.

Of course, the article you are reading is also part of this phenomenon. I, too, have become a Swiftie, after falling in love with her most recent studio album in 2022, Midnights, which is far more mature than any of her previous releases both musically and lyrically. Though despite the fact that I’ve listened to it maybe 100 times, I still think teaching it alongside the Bard is pretty insane. That means the social contagion has only hijacked a limited region of my neural machinery. You can protect yourself against the Swift meme by simply avoiding her albums and any content about her.

But this is easier said than done.

And that brings us back to the 2024 election.

A legitimately big question for the future of the nation is, will Swift, the 2023 TIME Person of the Year, publicly endorse Biden, and if so, how much of her memetic influence will she use to see that her candidate wins? It is this question that our scientific analysis can help answer.

Since we’ve determined that her career and personal decisions are intimately intertwined, it is almost certain that she won’t endorse Trump, despite her popularity with red America and a viral video — it was a complete fabrication — of Swift supposedly holding a flag reading “Trump Won.” During the 2020 campaign, Swift was publicly critical of Trump and advocated that Americans vote him out of office.

At this point, she literally can’t without losing all her media support and becoming enemy number one of the left.

The articles from websites such as The New Yorker are memetic influences that effectively trap Taylor Swift in a blue bubble and ensure that she doesn’t flip on the powers that catalyzed her stardom.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Swift will publicly back Biden this year, even if she did in 2020. Biden's team, of course, is actively dreaming of the day Swift does.

It’ll be interesting to see just how political she dares to get as the election approaches. The safest route for the continued spread of the Swift meme is for her to lay low and not rock the political boat much. That’s the prediction that memetics makes, and this Swiftie is pretty confident that we can trust the science.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.