Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

The two authors, one a psychologist (Matt Johnson) and the other a marketer (Prince Ghuman), have delightfully described how our supposedly hardwired brain can so skillfully be manipulated by the media, merchants, and other mercenaries.

Products strive to cement their names into consumers’ memories so that this relationship dominates choice selection. By associating products with heroes, charm, beauty, happiness, and other desirable attributes, the buyer usually identifies these alluring features with themselves. Price specials, fantastic discounts, manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and other markdowns tell nothing of the actual cost of an item.

The book chapters examine how branding and anchoring influence choices, where color contrasts, sound changes, and pricing variations modulate the buyer’s conceptions. Recent MRI brain studies display how the brain operates under different choice conditions, studies that advertising firms surely follow for tactics to better lure the customer. To view how marketing influences our brains, the authors engagingly guide the reader through the neuroscience of perception, memory, and addiction and show how neurons and neurochemicals regulate pleasure, empathy, logic, and how we think.

If you are concerned about how the media controls the mind, here is a readable resource to help see how companies and social media use brain and behavior research to manipulate viewers and thus achieve their objectives.