Corporations are learning about the way our brains respond to advertising, and they’re finding out that they don’t work the way we think they do. And that’s just the way the advertisers want it.

In order to help corporations study the way your brain works, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.”

Why is this research important to advertisers? According to FKF’s website it, “shows clearly that what people say in focus groups and in response to poll questions is not what they actually think, feel and do.”

It seems that brands live in a specific part of our brains, the same part that responds to the logos of sports teams. And we all know how rational we are about loyalty to sports teams. Ahem, Chicago Cubs?

What does this mean for you?

According to The Situationist, it’s pretty grim:

Corporations don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to learning counterintuitive information about human decision making and then using it responsibly. Rather, the best approach for maximizing shareholder profit is to discover some seemingly-illogical detail about the human brain, use that knowledge to sell more widgets, and then convince the public that their na

ve (and incorrect) beliefs about how they make choices are, in fact, correct.

The fact that your brain may not behaving how you think it does is a hard pill to swallow. We’d like to think that all our decisions are rational and objective. Surely, YOU aren’t manipulated by advertising, right? Not YOU. —MEGHANN MARCO

The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain [Situationist]

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