Proust, Escoffier, HM&P
The intuitions of artists never get the respect as truth realized that scientists get when they find ‘truth’ in the lab. On the other hand, it’s the rare scientist that brings home a Damien-Hirst-style paycheck. They probably both trump advertising, but us ad folks are always working somewhere at the point where art meets science.
Art and science rarely meet as completely as in Jonah Lehrer’s first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, which is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand the brain, emotions, and what it all means for advertising. The connection he makes between the fundamental truths of what great artists take from their own brains, and the science that has validated those truths is absolutely spell-binding. If you want to understand how to change the way people smell, feel, and taste the world– which is to say, if you’re one of us adfolk, you must read this book.
And while you’re at it, don’t miss his blog, either. Probably even more worthwhile than keeping up with Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.
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.
Emotions and the Eye
We’re all so steeped in the engineering paradigm for how our
brains and bodies work, that scientific findings like this
come as a surprise even though they shouldn’t. Our emotional
brains aren’t part of a computer system where vision, feelings,
heat and pain all run on different circuits. It’s all one big
system wrapped around itself. Via the blog Neurophilosophy, we
learn of a study by Canadian researchers that:
“provides the first direct evidence that the mood we are in
affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of
the visual cortex. Their findings show that putting on the
proverbial rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is not so much
about colour, but about the broadness of the view.”
They showed that influencing someone to be in a better mood,
by showing them faces of happy vs. sad faces, actually
improved their peripheral vision. The effect happened without
a negative cost to the information received in the central
vision field.
The message for us folks in advertising is clear. If you want
people to pay attention to what you’re saying, explosions and
loud noises may be exactly the wrong road to follow. Warm
them up and mellow them out first, and they’ll pay more
attention to what you show them.
