Foward-Thinking

At the top of my blog I pose a question taken from Read Montague book, “The Brain is Almost Perfect.”  How do we deal with an environment that is uncertain, unscripted, and at times dangerous?   Humans face tough decisions everyday, decisions saturated with a plethora of options.  We can’t pick every option because this is would be too cumbersome. Generals, after all, can’t use every strategy in their playbook; this would be expensive and fatigue their troops. The only solution available is a form of mental trial and error: use past knowledge to simulate the possible outcome for each option.  Essentially, they are constructing the future by thinking about the past

This paradoxical notion is essentially how the brain reduces uncertainty: it’s specifically designed to predict.  Our thoughts, awareness, subjective sensations, emotions and feelings are all products of the brains architecture to expect. The emotion trust, for example, is simply the product of our brain using data from past agreements with either our self and/or others to predict the probabilities of what might happen if we enter another agreement. In other words trust exists to capture the relationship we have with our future self or future others.  Do we trust ourselves in the morning to workout? Can we trust our partner to pick up groceries based on their prior record?

The fact that we are neurologically wired to focus on the future is the biological basis behind why marketing exists.  After all, isn’t marketing about selling future possibilities? The possibility of getting a new job because of that brand new suite? Or the possibility of a fun filled family vacation when you book a package for Jamaica? I think marketers sometimes forget that humans are essentially anticipation machines; we buy into expectations more than the products.  And since the mind dramatically affects our subjective sensations, our expectations about a product make or break the experience we have with it.   To hammer my point even more I’ll leave you with this funny yet insightful clip from Penn and Teller’s Showtime program “Bull Shit.”