What happens when a meme influences science? It would seem that researchers’ perceptions start to wheel around its axis.

A meme was the driver of this short 2015 commentary that stated:

“Most preclinical biomedical research, however, has been conducted with inadequate consideration of sex.”

If researchers discovered that gender hadn’t been adequately considered in research, maybe other “evolutionarily fundamental” factors had “inadequate consideration” as well.

Maybe one day soon, researchers will stop the current widespread exclusion of emotional content in studies, especially when the studies already included areas of the brain that are the biological bases of emotions.

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To imagine a potentially beneficial future meme, I substituted the word “emotion” for “sex” in the title and part of two paragraphs of this commentary. How well does this fit?

“[Emotion] inclusion in basic research drives discovery”

“Why is [emotion] so important?

Although many factors can influence an outcome, [emotion] is evolutionarily fundamental and affects the whole of the population

Across diverse disciplines, researchers risk drawing erroneous conclusions when they extrapolate outcome data from [emotional to non-emotional and vice versa].”

See A missed opportunity to study odor-evoked emotional memories for one deliberate exclusion of emotional content, although including emotions may have been appropriate, informative, and contributed to advancing science.

Click the hippocampus category to see a sample of human studies that may have included the biological seat of emotional memories, but only a scarce few of which included emotional content.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5257.full “Opinion: Sex inclusion in basic research drives discovery”