The token comes in through the slot and the steel balls start their journey down the chute...
I once took a class on marketing that stated that a person must hear a brand name an average of four times to remember it and nine times to act on it. Nine repetitions before that little ball pachinkos down into the subconscious and starts to do its work. I think about this a lot.
Because people don't act on the information in advertising while they're still conscious of having heard it. The idea is that one day you'll be walking through the store and you'll see the product on the shelf and somehow, without knowing exactly why, a tiny hidden urge will prompt you to reach out for the product and put it in your cart. Advertising works best when you don't realize that it's working.
Down the chute and into the pins they travel. The house and gravity always win.
Back in the early nineties, a neurologist named Antonio Damasio was doing research at the University of Iowa performing tests on patients who had suffered damage to different areas of their brains. Thanks to recent advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) detailed mapping of different brain areas and their functions was available, and diagnoses of which areas were damaged could be made with a high degree of accuracy. What Damasio did was perform psychological tests on patients with various types of brain damage to try to determine what role different areas of the brain played in decision-making. What he uncovered was something that con men have known for millennia: The "feeling" parts of the brain play a central role in even the simplest decisions.
A little background: There are parts of the brain that humans have in common with all other vertebrates. Generally speaking, the later evolutionary additions to the brain are on the outer layers of the physical structure; the cerebral cortex or neocortex. In the ice cream sundae of the brain, the cortex is the whipped cream and cherry on top. This is the part of the brain most associated with reasoning and the so-called "higher" functions. While other mammals may have neocortices, humans (and, oddly, certain marine mammals) have extraordinarily large and well developed ones, and this big fancy cortex has been credited with the things humans are good at and animals aren’t, things like language, tool manipulation, logic and reasoning.
The functions performed here also constitute the bulk of the mental processes that people ordinarily have conscious access to, that is to say we know what we are thinking and can, with effort, follow a line of thought from beginning to end. Which is why interview-style psychological testing tends to overemphasize the role these areas play in ordinary decision-making. People tend to attribute their decisions to reasoned processes when questioned after the fact, but Damasio’s research told a different story.
What he found was that feelings acted as a shortcut in the process. Long before any kind of rational weighing of the options could occur , feelings associated with prior experiences informed the outcome. Damasio called these "somatic markers," emotions such as fear, delight or dread that often manifested as physical sensations – a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, a giddy excitement , a cold shiver of anticipation. Through these visceral reactions, subjects were able to make decisions based on their "gut instinct." Patients who had suffered damage to feeling centers of the brain such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortices, near the brain stem, found decision-making extremely difficult. Having to rationally address every decision down to the "paper or plastic" level of minutia proved to be debilitating.
Damasio suggests the example of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer (who described killing as "a career") as an extreme example of what a completely cold and calculating mind is capable of, absent any of the feelings that mitigate such antisocial tendencies in most people.
What Damasio had also done, without realizing it, was opened the door to a novel method for studying human behavior. Others with various goals would soon pick this up and run with it.
Against all odds, a ball finds its way into a bonus slot and Bells! Are! Ringing! The display lights up: Cherry! Cherry!…..
Posted by flamingbanjo at October 17, 2004 11:03 AM