You lie in an fMRI tunnel as a market researcher asks if you like his company’s new product: a butt-kicking, gas-guzzling, V-12 SUV. You know you shouldn’t like the earth-killing behemoth and so you respond no. But the researcher watches your amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex light up—you may say no, but your pleasure centers are screaming yeah, baby, yeah. They want it and because humans are but weak pawns to our pleasure centers, you would buy it (if you could …). Your brain has betrayed you and the planet is doomed.
This is an example of the very scary field of neuromarketing—looking inside the human brain to see which products light our lamps. The classic example of neuromarketing is a 2004 study of Coke versus Pepsi published in the journal Neuron. In this Pepsi Challenge, researchers fMRI-scanned the brains of sixty-seven participants as they blindly tasted the two soft drinks. Almost exactly half the brains lit up more for Coke and half lit up more for Pepsi.
But why then does Coke have a disproportionately large market share?
Wild Kingdom: Pufferfish
Beware the deadly pufferfish. Eating even a bite of the wrong part is 60 percent lethal. That’s because the pufferfish is packed with tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin that elbows out sodium as the gatekeeper of the brain’s ion channels. If sodium can’t tell these ion channels to open and close, neurons can’t fire and brain activity stops. This, as you might guess, is bad. There is no known antidote.
But administered very carefully, tetrodotoxin can cause muscle paralysis without affecting the brain—it can make your body seem dead while your mind’s still alive. And as such, many hypothesize the chemical as the agent of Haitian voodoo zombiism.
The researchers tried the experiment again, this time telling participants beforehand which beverage they were drinking. Instead of simply lighting up pleasure centers, this time the brains showed activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, areas of thought and memory. And three-quarters of the participants chose Coke (similar to Coke’s market share). Basically, Coke’s connection to our memories and expectations give it the edge, even on a neural level. Thus neuromarketers determined that Pepsi’s recipe is fine, it’s the branding that needs help.
If you think neuromarketing is unlikely to change the world, think again. Take, for example, the 2008 presidential election, in which John McCain failed to light the amygdalas of enough registered voters. What could he have said to create more positive brain vibes? Did he need to hold tight to the image of happy warrior or was he right to go negative? To what issues did voters most viscerally respond and which positions were the most popular? You can be sure that future candidates will know, having tested their platforms and personalities directly on the brains of voters.
The French Diet
Most people rate the food in Paris higher than the food in Chicago. But Parisians eat less than Chicagoans. Why?
In fact, the French eat less than Americans because they listen to their bodies’ consumption cues: When they’re full, they stop. Americans are more likely to rely on external cues: When our TV show’s over, we stop. Or when the plate’s empty, we stop.