1: How Brands Enter the Mind
The human brain is an astoundingly powerful complex organ, with a network of a hundred billion neurons, each of which has 10,000 or more connections. Its information processing and storage capabilities are incredibly vast, and scientists are astounded. The more they discover, the more they recognize they have grossly underestimated its capabilities. And the human mind, which resides inside this organ, is utterly mysterious - our most advanced science has only a vague and clumsy method of observing the cascading movements of energy and chemicals at a moment in time. This is largely the reason that those who study the mind depart from observing the brain as an organ and simply observe human behavior and theorize about its motivations. While human behavior is also quite complex, it is possible to observe and can lead to plausible theories that have more functional value.
Speaking of function, it's important to remember that all of this complexity is merely a means to a very basic end: survival. All of this reasoning, thinking, and feeling is merely a side-effect of the primary purpose of the mind, which is to help the creature recognized opportunities and threats in its environment and react in a way that prolongs its survival. And more specifically, the purpose of the brain is to guide our movements. Only animals that move have brains. He mentions the sea squirt, an animal that starts life as a swimming creature with a brain - but once it finds a suitable location, it attaches itself and digests its own brain. Since there's no longer a need to move, there's no longer an need to think.
So putting this together, the brain is a survival organ whose purpose is to understand the environment, recognize things that are relevant to our survival needs, and guide our motions accordingly. This also means that all of human behavior in the modern world is based on the same basic principles and functions - all the abstract and sophisticated things we do are merely expressions of our means of survival (EN: or in many instances, perversions of actions that once contributed to our means of survival).
While the original functions of the brain were basic - to sense and move through the world - and presently constitute only a tiny fraction of what our brains can do. Reptiles still have tiny brains that suffice to help them survive, to maintain their autonomous systems (pulse, respiration, etc.), to flee threats and pursue food. The considerably larger human mind is capable of far more complex tasks related to survival: a man does not scavenge for food, but buys a meal at a restaurant with money he earned by doing the work of a professor of mathematics - even though the connection between the actions he performs (lecturing) and the benefit he receives (food) is not readily apparent.
And complex systems are subject to complex failures. The complexity of the mind enables us to delude ourselves into believing (and acting on the belief) that something harmful is beneficial, to ignore what is necessary and prioritize what is trivial, to expend far more energy than achieving a goal is worth, and in many other ways to pursue the wrong course of actions insofar as basic survival is concerned. In rising above our instinctual drives, we have escaped stupidity to embrace insanity - and are in a constant struggle to find the sweet spot between these two extremes.
In essence, human beings live in a world of imagination, inspired by sense-data but by no means limited to it. "We see with our brains, not with our eyes," the author asserts. The eye is simply an organ that perceives light and communicates this sensation to the brain. It is in the brain that we distinguish shades and colors, consider the shape and distance of things, recognize what those things are and what they mean to us. Our perception of the world has more to do with what we think than what we detect with our sensory organs.
Much is made about the limitations of human sensation (we cannot see as many colors, hear as many sounds, or discern as many scents as other animals), but our mental abilities provide an extension of sensation: while our senses receive only partial information, the mind is astute enough to piece together the details to understand the details our senses fail to provide. This can also go awry, such as the case of an optical illusion where the brain incorrectly interprets sense-data.
This works because the brain creates "schemas" which associate various sense-data to a given concept, and then activates that schema when some (but not all) sense data match against it. It is the reason that people sense that an onion and an apple taste very different when they know what they are eating - but in a blind taste-test few are able to reliably distinguish one from another: we have an idea of what each of the things tastes like, and this influences the way in which we perceive them. And back to the opening example, it is the reason a person expresses a preference for the flavor of a specific brand of premium vodka, even though the product is flavorless.
He refers to the experiment in which people were scanned by an MRI while tasting samples of various wines. Their brain activity indicated more intense pleasure when they were told that they were drinking more expensive wines, even though it was the exact same wine each time. It is not merely pretense that makes people claim to like expensive wines better - it is a biological fact that simply knowing the price influences the way they perceive the taste. The author notes that the same experiment was repeated with world-renowned wine experts, who allegedly have very discerning senses of taste - and the result was the same: expectations bias our interpretation of reality.
All of this is very important to branding: if marketers can create a positive impression of their brand, the customer's expectations become their reality when they experience the brand. They like it because they expected to like it, and become loyalists to the brand - even if their sensory experience is unremarkable or objectively inferior.