What's troubling is that neuromarketers may be able to bypass conscious thought to tap directly into, say, liking and desiring systems to incite us to press the buy button. (pg 160)
This is not precisely a new idea--that marketing attempts to subconsciously motivate people to buy a product--but it is imperative to understand this in the context of a politicking and consumer-market driven society such as America. I should make it clear that I do not find all sources of pleasure or desire to be hedonistic or sadistic, but given a sufficient emotional 'critical mass', it absolutely is just that.
To give background on what I shall specifically refer to, it is important to note that these areas of the brain play a preeminent, superordinate role in their respective arenas:
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (dlPFC): Cognitive, analytical deliberation predicated on reason
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC): Emotional awareness and direct modulation, though influenced by the dlPFC.
Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC): Involved in reward-based learning and expectation; the vmPFC is subsumed by the OFC in some definitions
Subcortical Reward Circuitry: primitive circuitry that responds to what is liked or wanted by releasing opioids and dopamine respectively.
Now back to the idea of neuromarketing and the 'free market' we so espouse today. As Stein points out, it is clear that a consumer-driven market's goal is to activate the subcortical and primitive regions of the brain that drive an individual to desire and obtain products. It is interesting to think that our society believes a free market system is indeed just that, free, when in fact it is precisely a result of hijacking the subcortical system of the brain that entails the majority of consumption in America's society today. Is this effectively different from heroin or cocaine? Yes and no. Both utilize the reward circuitry of the brain to hijack the behavior of a person, but a consumer-driven stimulus in a commercial society will not have the same strength, obviously, as heroin or cocaine. We can choose not to act on every desirable thing we see (some people better than others), but given sufficient critical mass generated by learned consumerism--resulting from changes to the OFC which incorporate the lessons 'learned' from registering reward-circuitry activity--is it not the case that this ability to choose is selectively pressured against, mitigated, in a sense?
Furthermore, a consumer-driven economy that is predicated on novel pleasure rather than a functional improvement of one's life can be directly in conflict with a person's health in the same way (albeit less overt) that addiction operates in the brain. Examples? The preference of a cheeseburger over a salad. Buying a new car that gets 16 miles to the gallon, siphoning funds from other areas of one's life and unnecessarily polluting the environment. The desire to eat sugar until one's pancreas explodes (hyperbole) from developing Type II Diabetes. Buying a new Blu-Ray DVD instead of donating to a fund for the treatment of disease that one will inevitably develop as a consequence of the natural process of aging. It is easy to see, given the way a "free" market system operates--by subcortically driving our behavior toward short-term pleasure--that it is not as free as we'd like to think, either in terms of being free from strings attached or in terms of allowing us to freely analyze the positives and negatives based on rational thought (that we mistakenly presume to be a unique feature of humankind; we are not, in fact, driven by objective reason alone, and evidently not even predominantly so).
It stands to reason from this line of thought that a market free to run roughshod should not be given quite the subversive power it has accrued from government deregulation that allows it to subjugate our long-term interests. Given the direction of our nation comparatively to other nations in life expectancy, education, and mental health rates and indices, this is tantamount to a neural Pyrrhic Victory. I am not stupid to believe that a managed market will ultimately be a standalone solution to this, but a radical redistribution of wealth through taxation for the purpose of funding university-level programs dedicated specifically to long-term interests--such as health, education, science--is precisely what is requisite to curtail such a tacit enslavement.
To the issue of politics and buzzwords, it is first important to outline the role the vmPFC plays in monitoring & modulating more primitive limbic (emotional) areas of the brain. As Sam Harris, Joshua Greene, and to a lesser extent Vinod Goel have demonstrated, when it comes to decision-making, emotions and beliefs play a large role in dictating the appropriate course of action. While it is the case that the dlPFC also plays a role in decision-making, the course of action is dictated by the emotional salience of a stimulus. In other words, given sufficient critical emotional mass, rational thought will be subordinate to emotionally-driven beliefs that decide what is right and wrong in actions/beliefs.
How precisely does this relate to Buzzwords? Politics in the last 10 years has seen an exponential increase in terms that are based on manipulating feelings to a point that influences one's opinion to a politician's advantage. This is not news either, but is important to know that this is analogous to the supposed "free market" model we so adore. If an individual is asked if they would mind if the government has the immune right to tamper with their private lives without requiring evidence to support the effectiveness of this putative government right, almost universally people will say "no." However, if you label it the Protect American Act, the emotional tide turns and people most certainly will be enraged by any effort not to protect America, thus giving the emotional critical mass necessary to override cognitive, rational thought generated in the analysis of the actual plan itself. Isn't it ironic that "free" market itself is simply ostensible, a buzzword to generate emotional dissonance toward government management?
In summation, it is precisely due to a wildly consumerized pandering to the evolutionarily lowest common denominator of the subcortical and emotionally-laden circuitry of the brain that society digests things that otherwise may not be good for them, that come at the cost of the long-term interest of the species, and effecitvely reduce one's ability to cognitively predicate 'opinion' on empirical evidence. It is precisely why today we continue to slide in our cultural dedication to education, science, physical health, and mental health, and that unless we change the way we perceive the world, our nation will be diminished. Based on the tenets of what is neuroscientifically understood to drive human behavior, one must not--as Republicans suggest inaccurately--implicitly trust a lay individual engulfed in such a society to *necessarily be* an authority on how money ought to be used, that somehow the individual outweighs the whole. Inextricable to health and self-interest is, in fact, a necessary mitigation of self-indulgence that is exacerbated by the Republican "free" market culture.
From Goel and [others'] work, it is certainly apparent how influential and deeply embedded in logical thinking are irrational, emotion-dominant belief systems. These subterranean affective wellsprings undoubtedly can be tapped and harnessed to incalculable coercive control and profit. "People make tons of decisions and often they don't know why," [Marco Iacoboni of UCLA] said. (pg 162.)
These are the reasons FDR was right.
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