I believe that North Americans, in general, like the concept of having free choice. They enjoy the concept of being able to decide on matters that will affect them. From what I can tell, this desire to choose starts at a young age. From my own life, I know my daughter enjoys picking the fruit she will eat for breakfast or the snack she will eat in the afternoon. While she usually sticks to picking apples and bananas, every now and then she’ll pick something out of the blue like, say, a raw egg. Now I know that eating a raw egg is not exactly the best dietary choice for a toddler, but she doesn’t know that. However, if I make her eat something else, she will start to pout and get upset she didn’t get to eat the raw egg. While I’m sure many parents can relate to this story, I wonder how many of them realize that as a people, we often act like this too. Read more…

Neuro-Marketing, Neuroscience

Craving pudding pops
Emotions are important. Cognitive ability can lead you to water, but it’s your emotions that will urge you to drink. Advertisers have known this for a long time. They know it is better to sell you the sizzle rather than the steak because they know it’s better to reach you on an emotional level than on a logical one. This fact is the reason that many advertisers choose to use celebrity spokespeople. Read more…

Neuro-Marketing, Neuroscience Nature vs. Nurture

What’s the weather like tomorrow?

As a people, we generally like to figure out how something works so that we can affect and benefit from it in the future. To understand this notion, one only has to look as far as the local news broadcast to see that we all want to know is whether we have to pack an umbrella tomorrow. Of course this is not to say that our interests in the future solely reside in the realm of meteorology. Let’s face it. For the most part we are all interested in money at some level. So it should come as no surprise that experts have been trying to model economies and how financial decisions are made for decades. But while some things can be modelled faithfully through expected-value analysis, there always seems to remain a difference between what these models predict and reality. Read more…

Critical eye, Neuroscience