brain alteration through branding

"People actually remember few ads. Yet commercials have an effect nonetheless. Even if they fail to sell a particular product, they sell consumerism itself by ceaselessly reiterating the idea that there is a product to solve each of life's problems, indeed that existence would be satisfying and complete if only we bought the right things." - Alan Durning

In a study conducted in 2007 to see if branding affected preschoolers the children were given identical food: one was branded McDonald's, the other was presented in unmarked wrappers. Three quarters of the children thought the McDonald's branded food tasted better.

"Advertisers have tried to do exactly what this study is talking about - to brand younger and younger children, to instill in them an almost obsessional desire for a particular brand-name product." - Dr. Victor Strasburger, American Academy of Pediatrics

To find profit in so many similar items, marketers must brand a product on a buyer's mind.

Such efforts put the average American adult in the cross hairs of as many as 3,000 advertising messages a day, five times more than two decades ago. Children are exposed to 40,000 advertisements every year. By the age of 18 months, they can recognize logos. By 10, they have memorized 300 to 400 brand logos. The average adult can recognize thousands of brand logos.

Many seemingly rational decisions are reflexive snap judgments, shaped by networks of neurons acting in concert.

These orchestras of cells are surprisingly malleable, readily responding to the influence of experience. The inescapable influence of marketing does more than change minds.

Brand marketing physically alters the brain structure.

Just as practicing the piano or learning to read can physically alter areas of the cerebral cortex, the intense, repetitive stimulation of marketing shapes susceptible brain circuits involved in decision-making.

"We are embedded in an enormous sea of cultural messages, the neural influences of which we poorly understand. We are beginning to understand the way in which messages can gain control over our behavior." - neuroscientist Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

While monitoring brain activity directly researchers make inquiries into consumer choice by harnessing techniques pioneered for medical diagnosis: positron emission tomography, which measures the brain's chemical activity; magnetic-resonance imagery, which measures the brain's magnetic fields; and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow around working neurons.

"This is a way of prying open the box and seeing what is inside," said psychologist Jonathan Cohen, director of Princeton University's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind & Behavior.

In the mind's eye, celebrities trigger many of the same circuits as images of shoes, cars, chairs, wristwatches, sunglasses, handbags and water bottles.

Objects and celebrity faces were reduced to a common denominator: a spasm of synapses in a part of the cortex called Brodmann's area 10, a region associated with a sense of identity and social image. None of these neural responses come consciously to mind when a shopper is browsing brand labels.

Much of what was traditionally considered the product of logic and deliberation is actually driven by primitive brain systems responsible for automatic emotional response processes that evolved to manage conflicts between sex, hunger, thirst and the other elemental appetites of survival.

In recent years, researchers have discovered that regions such as the amygdala, the hippocampus and the hypothalamus are dynamic switchboards that blend memory, emotions and biochemical triggers.

These interconnected neurons shape the ways that fear, panic, exhilaration and social pressure influence the choices humans make.

Political beliefs trigger the same malleable circuits of reward, identity, desire and threat that product branding does.

Lattices of neurons are linked by pathways forged, then continually revised, by experience.

So intimate is this feedback that there is no way to separate the brain's neural structure from the influence of the world that surrounds it.

As researchers have learned to map the anatomy of behavior they have realized that the brain shaped by the interplay of genes and environment is more malleable than anyone had guessed.

Coherence in Thought and Action

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American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

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