Lucid Thoughts

A thread that runs through quite a number of the journalistic treatments I read about neuroscience applied to commercial stimuli (like ads, products, and brands) is fear … fear of a “Manchurian Candidate” technique that will turn people into consuming robots, fear of privacy, fear of science being co-opted by greedy corporations at the expense of the powerless private consumer.

Much of this fear, I believe, comes from a misunderstanding of exactly how our brains operate at the nonconscious level.  People seem to imagine the brain as a passive recipient, sitting there (floating there?) innocently, waiting to be infected by the alien probe, the “trigger program” that fires off the “buy button.”

This is just bad science.  We should have more respect for our brains and their capabilities.  In fact what happens in our brains every second is a highly effective filtering system, tuned by evolution to be quite good at its job.  And much of that job is to actively keep things out, not let any old message in to have its way with us.

Maybe if we focused more on the receiving system, rather than the message, we could rebalance the perception a bit.  Maybe if we talked more about the brain’s “sensing tools” rather than the “subliminal messages” and “nonconscious primes” those sensing tools detect, we would see the process as less passive, less threatening.

What is astounding about our sensing tools is how well they work, in the background, without requiring the spotlight of attention and conscious thought.  We are constantly sizing up our situation, determining what to approach and avoid, and adjusting the cognitive and emotional tags we use to compute the meaning and reward-threat potential of all the objects in our immediate environment.  And in general, we do a pretty good job of it.

For example, in the study of hope and fear in political advertising we did last Fall, we found that people updated their default attention levels and emotional tags for political candidates based on their exposure to positive and negative campaign ads.  After they watched a set of one candidate’s self-promotion ads and the other candidate’s attack ads, they adjusted their implicit responsiveness to the positive candidate UP, and their implicit responsiveness to the negative candidate DOWN.  As a result, when we exposed them later to emotionally-tagged images of the candidates, they paid more attention to images of the candidate who had been portrayed positively, and less to the attacker.  And that was the case even if the attacker was their preferred candidate.

I think what we were observing was the sensing tools at work at the atomic level of attitude change.  After this one exposure, people didn’t feel like they were responding differently to the candidates.  But we saw clearly that their brains were responding differently.  How many such experiences do people have during a campaign?  Thousands?  How many small adjustments do we make in our candidate assessments over that course of time?  And how does all that come to bear when we go into the voting booth and have to finally sum up the whole experience and make a decision?

The same sorts of implicit processes are constantly at work in all of our interactions with our world – from family and friends to music groups to ketchup bottles.  These are impressive and powerful processes, and we should have more respect for them.