NPR : Jonesing for Fries? Blame the Cave Men
Great story on why we crave the foods we do on NPR today. I was wandering through the mall the other day and discovered the majority of mannequins with nipples. Nipples! As though I should be attracted to them. I think we’re entering into (or have already been in) a time where marketing has our collective numbers. There is a great old study where a mouse has a sensor implanted in the pleasure sensor of its brain and the mouse does nothing else than hit a bar which triggers the sensor until it dies of starvation. Marketing isn’t far off from this… it takes our completely normal evolutionary responses to things (for example, salt was a leading indicator of valuable nutrients in natural foods) and optimizes just for that sense. Soon we’ll be walking down the mall with huge floating abstract shapes which we all think looks kind of good but somehow touches the exact neurons in our brain which are designed to do nothing else but indicate a critical need to spend our last cent on a totally useless garment which at one time may have provided a brief respite from the elements but is now so designed that it makes it totally impractical for wearing any longer than 5 minutes. Yet we’ll feel fantastic about doing it! Scary.