Last month I speculated that physical experiences will play an enormous role in the future of marketing and communications. Researchers have discovered that your experiences act as a kind of source code for your brain. In the same way that computer code dictates what you see on a web page, different physical experiences write different ideas in your unconscious.
But I didn’t go far enough. I should have told you that your brain uses physical experiences to make sense of the world--whether you are actually having the experience or not. Researchers call this magical power “simulation,” and it is the key to making the experiential code available to everyone in marketing, even if the work you do isn’t physical.
It all started in the mid-1990s with the eating of an ice cream cone at a research lab in Parma, Italy. The team there had implanted electrodes in the brain of a monkey in order to map out which neurons controlled the monkey’s movements. One of the researchers had brought an ice cream cone back from lunch, and as the monkey watched him lift the cone to his mouth there was a spike in the monkey’s neural activity. The astonishing discovery: The neurons that fired were the same neurons the monkey used to move his own actual body. The monkey’s brain seemed to be having a physical experience just by watching a physical experience.
It turns out we all have a special cluster of cells in our brains that scientists have named “mirror neurons” because they seem to mirror in your brain an experience you see, hear, or read. For example, researchers discovered that certain parts of your brain light up when you kick your foot. Those same parts of your brain also light up when you just hear the word “kick.” In a separate study, researchers revealed that the word “cinnamon” activates the same part of your brain that turns on when you actually smell cinnamon. You understand the word by simulating the actual experience in your unconscious--just like you are doing right now....
[Source: Fast Company]
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