Fried Logic

Mirror Neurons

Anyone interested in how emotions work in advertising needs to know about about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been in the news a lot the past few years, if you keep up with the science columns in places like the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, but surprisingly few people in the advertising world have been paying attention.

That’s too bad, because it’s probably one of the areas of science that is most likely to revolutionize how we understand advertising. Understanding mirror neurons will save us from a lot of bad mistakes. Hopefully.

Now you don’t need to troll the blogs and science columns to understand mirror neurons. Marco Iacoboni, one of the lead researchers in the field, has written a wonderful book that will tell you much more than I can about how they work and why they’re important. As he puts it, mirror neurons are the mechanism for empathy. They are the proof that “We are hard-wired to feel what others experience as if it were happening to us.”

Think about that next time you see someone experiencing pain in an ad. The Super Bowl ad with Justin Timberlake may have gotten a lot of buzz, but if you read this book, you’ll realize that it also hurt a lot of groins.