In 1976, a year after Wilson had lit up the sky with Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a British zoologist and Darwinian fundamentalist, Richard Dawkins, published a book called The Selfish Gene in which he announced the discovery of memes. Memes were viruses in the form of ideas, slogans, tunes, styles, images, doctrines, anything with sufficient attractiveness or catchiness to infect the brain -- “infect,” like “virus” became part of the subject’s earnest, wannabe-scientific terminology -- after which they operated like genes, passing along what had been naively thought of as the creations of culture.Dawkins’s memes definitely infected the fundamentalists, in any event. The literature of Memeland began pouring out. Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. William H. Calvin’s How Brains Think, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Robert Wr8ight’s The Moral Animal, The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (with a foreword by Richard Dawkins) and on and on. Dawkins has many devout followers precisely because his memes are seen as the missing link in Darwinism as a theory, a theoretical discovery every bit as important as the skull of the Peking man. One of Bill Gates’s epigones at Microsoft, Charles Simonyi, was so impressed with Dawkins and their historic place on the scientific frontier, he endowed a chair at Oxford University titled the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science and installed Dawkins in it. This makes Dawkins the postmodern equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dawkins is Archbishop of Darwinian Fundamentalism and Hierophant of the Memes.
There turns out to be one serious problem with memes, however. They don’t exist. A neurophysiologist can use the most powerful and sophisticated brain imaging now available -- and still not find a meme. The Darwinian fundamentalists, like fundamentalists in any area, are ready for such an obvious objection. They will explain that memes operate in a way analogous to genes, i.e., through natural selection and survival of the fittest memes. But in science, unfortunately, “analogous to” just won’t do. The tribal hula is analogous to the waving of a wheat field in the wind before the rain, too. Here the explanatory gap becomes enormous. Even though some of the fundamentalists have scientific credentials, not one even hazards a guess as to how, in physiological, neural terms, the meme “infection” is supposed to take place. . . .
Ideas don't exist?
Memes are simply ideas stored in the physical structure of the brain according to Dawkins. My concept is broader, but lets stick with his. Acquiring a meme would be learning. It has been proven that learning changes the structure of the brain. Contrary to your selected source, these structures are visible, so "a neurophysiologist can use the most powerful and sophisticated brain imaging now available -- and still not find a meme." is a false statement.
Here is an article on learning changing the physical structure of the brain
http://www.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/ch5.html