The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind Read Online Free PDF Page B

hierarchies. While it is true that “simple puzzles” intrigue and attract the brain, if the puzzle requires more than a few seconds to resolve, the brain gives up , and often rejects the message, with prejudice against your brand (aka negative priming).
    So evolution offers a twofold compromise: First, the large brain begins folding in on itself, creating grooves and valleys to fit within the skull (see Figure 3.1).
    Second, infants are born while their heads are still small enough to pass through the mother’s pelvis, but long before they are ready to face the world.
    Helpless and dependent, human babies require their mothers to stay put, at least for some time. They require fathers to provide for the mothers. They require group cooperation and an increasingly complicated social structure to support them. Because of the need to operate in a complex social group, the brain continues to evolve and grow in size, developing empathy, deception, altruism, and the building of coalitions.
    This big, complex brain separates us from every other animal on Earth and gives us extraordinary capacities like linear thinking, complex language

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    Your Customer’s Brain Is 100,000 Years Old
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    Figure 3.1
    To compensate for limited space inside the skull, the brain develops folds and ridges.
    Source: Photo used with permission from istockphoto.com development, the ability to understand symbols and metaphors, to develop and comprehend the complex strategies of mathematics, and to communicate with purpose and grace.
    Large, complex brains exist in other species such as some whales, dolphins, great apes, chimpanzees, and orangutans. These mammals are typically highly social also, have long lives with long gestational and developmental periods, living in complex groups that hunt together and form life-long bonds. They also require planning and memory to hunt, adapt, and mate successfully.
    As humans work and live in small groups, natural selection favors greater intelligence. We grow smarter still until the brain, around 100,000 years ago, reaches its current size and configuration. It becomes exquisitely attuned to its social and environmental needs. Always alert for predators, forever searching for food, warmth, shelter, and suitable mates to pass on genes, the human brain—the same model we share today—developed hard-wired abilities and responses honed to the survival of the species. Encounters were filtered and filed primarily via six human emotions: sadness, fear, anger, disgust, happiness, P1: OTA/XYZ
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    The Buying Brain
    and surprise, and possibly a seventh, contempt. The prefrontal cortex (the most advanced part of the brain), began conducting its symphony (including long range planning, storing and planting food, and hunting and finding animals in season), learning socially-appropriate behavior and task switching. Soon it launches humans into a new world beyond daily survival into a dance of possibilities—featuring representations of objects further removed in time and space and manipulated with logic and emotion. This big new brain absorbs and exudes culture, bringing itself to full modernity. Figurative art, music, self-ornamentation, trade, burial, and consciousness of an afterlife become imbedded in—the society, which begins to thrive rather than just survive.
    The human brain is emotional at its very core. While women process messaging with more emotion than men, both genders must be engaged emotionally for a message to be remembered and acted upon. Advertisers must uncover the key emotional triggers their product inspires and pinpoint them in their messaging. Package designers must carefully imbue their designs with palatable, even visceral, emotive imagery and shapes.
    Merchandisers must make the experience of