Memes
Though as another point, until we've hacked the brain apart and can understand it I don't think we can call the brain an anything machine. We have ideas about how it works, but the intricate details you need to know to call it a "meme machine" just aren't available yet. You never know, perhaps the neural networks that flash up with ideas will be analogous to genes in that you can point to them and draw a ring around them, then we'll have found the "meme", but that's not terribly likely.
If it has no predictive power, it's not exactly a science in and of itself then, is it? I guess there are somewhat meme-like units in memory psychology called chunks, which are defined by their associational strength with other chunks, e.g. in a random assortment of letters ("ahnwvsnxccd"), each letter would count as a chunk, but familiar abbreviations ("JFK NASA UK CIA KGB") would count as one chunk because of their associations.