This article draws practical connections between multiple research studies about how our brains work. In the event that you don’t like my conclusions, I invite you to read each source and formulate your own opinion – after all, that’s what you have your own brain for…right?
Concept 1 – Mind Reading
“Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University showed people drawings of five tools (hammer, drill and the like) and five dwellings (castle, igloo…) and asked them to think about each object’s properties, uses and anything else that came to mind. Meanwhile, fMRI measured activity throughout each volunteer’s brain. As the scientists report this month in the journal PLoS One, the activity pattern evoked by each object was so distinctive that the computer could tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone was thinking about a hammer and not, say, pliers.” – Newsweek (1.21.08)
“The activity patterns—from visual areas to movement area to regions that encode abstract ideas like the feudal associations of a castle—were eerily similar from one person to another. ‘This establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people’s brains represent the same object,’” – Newsweek (1.21.08)
If what your brain does when it thinks about an igloo is almost identical to what mine does, that suggests the possibility of a universal mind-reading dictionary, in which brain-activity pattern x means thought y in most people.” – Newsweek (1.21.08)
Well, the mind-reading dictionary wasn’t my first thought, but I’d probably purchase one. My first thought was the implications this research has in the advertising world. When a new product’s ‘brand,’ is first being developed, advertisers endlessly tweak the exact values and feelings they want a consumer to understand and feel concerning that product. To do this, they often use various association methods, hoping that the consumer will relate to their ads and ultimately to the product. With this research, that each consumer’s brain, at least physically, undergoes the same initial neural response when thinking about a specific object, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that a similar process might occur when perceiving the generic associations attempted in different advertisements. So, now that objective methods could become tools to elicit desired responses from a consumer concerning a product, lets look at just how influential those tools might be.
Concept 2 – Brain Branding
“It appears that the neural pathways for perceptions about sensory pleasures operate independently and distinctly from the pathways that control “cultural knowledge”. (3) This distinction challenges the notion that our perceptions are formed in a clear, logical way.” – Andrew Garza (06)
“From the fact that the participants’ preference for the labeled Coke corresponds with more activity in the DLPFC and hippocampus than in the VMPFC, one might extrapolate that preferences for highly branded goods are based more on advertising-induced “cultural knowledge” (3)” – Andrew Garza (06)
“Cultural influences on our behavioral preferences for food and drink are now intertwined with the biological expediency that shaped the early version of the underlying preference mechanisms. In many cases, cultural influences dominate what we eat and drink. Behavioral evidence suggests that cultural messages can insinuate themselves into the decision-making processes that yield preferences for one consumable or another.” – Samuel M. McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latane ́ M. Montague, and P. Read Montague (04)
Now we’re seeing evidence that these value-based associations which advertisers used to explain and better associate their products with consumers are working to mold the mind of consumers. Physical properties or logic-based criteria might not have as much impact as we like to think; subjective criteria appears to outweigh logic and function in modern consumer choices. Remember now…the subjective criteria mentioned here might be more objective than we thought, as we learned in Concept 1 – Mind Reading.
Concept 3 – Mind Body & Soul
“Emory University psychologist Clint Kilts scanned subjects as they looked at a variety of products, from cars to soft drinks, and found that this sense of brand identification elicited a strong response in the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the brain area associated with what psychologists call the “sense of self,” one’s self-constructed identity.” – Newsweek (7.5.04)
Not only do these associations facilitate a consumer’s decision, but the brand associations, which are evidently malleable by a third-party, also leave lasting impressions on the consumer’s self-cognizance.
Concept 4 – Susceptible Storage
“A dominant hypothesis in cognitive psychology is that long-term memory is archived in the network structure, which resembles associative networks of terms. Our results suggest that keyword extraction by the neural-network dynamics with continuous attractors might symbolically represent context-dependent retrieval of short-term memory from long-term memory in the brain.” – Yukihiro Tsuboshita & Hiroshi Okamoto (07)
Let’s Review
- Individual brains tend to relate associations in universally similar physical ways
- Consumers use non-logical subjective mental associations to make product decisions
- Consumers consider themselves as a match for certain products based on those same associations
- Associations that are subject to outside influence may regulate our overall organization of thought
So, not only is my thought physically the same as yours when we think about a similar topic or object, but we are both likely susceptible to the universally objective associations about which we think. I could initiate a physical response by showing you a hammer or an igloo, and know that I am attaching that stimulation to whatever I choose to associate it with. In addition, I can know that the association I’ve drawn has an impact on your choices as a consumer, and that it will be embedded into your general neural framework to resurface next time you go shopping and run across my hammer or igloo.
In theory, if I could outline the connections universally drawn by all consumers, and develop an algorithm to weed out individual environmental variables that might affect influence, I could effectively manage the associations of all people. Like a conductor in front of a symphony, I could direct all consumer choices with the simple wave of my baton.
This conclusion threatens free-will and illustrates that the influence advertising has on consumer purchases may be more powerful than ever thought. Or, we could take it all with a grain of salt, and chalk it up to an immature science and a paranoid writer. I’d personally like to think a lot of other factors come into play, and in a muscle of such infinite strength and mystery as our brain, I am going to keep looking for them. But for now, don’t crawl under a rock….buy my new book – Mind Control: How to Reorder Mental Associations and More.
