7. Of Google and Cigarettes

“We don’t sell Tic Tacs; we sell cigarettes. And they’re cool, and available ... and addictive. The job is almost done for you.”

BR in Thank You for Smoking

Cigarettes will kill you. They will give you cancer. They will give you emphysema. They make your breath stink. When you smoke, little lines become etched around your mouth. You can know and believe all this, but if you are addicted to cigarettes, it doesn’t matter. Consciously, you are convinced that cigarettes are a threat to your life, but your unconscious keeps reaching for the pack in your pocket or purse.

Within a year of surgery, almost half of lung cancer patients return to smoking. The enormity of that statistic vividly illustrates the power of the habitual mind. Part of your lung is being removed because you are sucking on poison, but neural circuits in the limbic region of your brain are still dying for a smoke. The addictive process provides a unique view into the workings of habits.

Nicotine is the addictive component in cigarettes; it is also remarkably toxic. It is the tobacco plant’s defense mechanism against insects. Drop for drop, nicotine is more poisonous than strychnine or rattlesnake venom. But in the human brain, nicotine triggers the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward in the limbic system—the same circuit cocaine affects. Nicotine is a stimulant, yet it paradoxically triggers feelings of both stimulation and relaxation, usually depending on the mental and physical state of the user.

For several years, I was a counselor and program director in alcohol and drug treatment centers. As hard as it was to get clients off cocaine, alcohol, and meth, cigarettes were even harder. I think the twin effects of physical stimulation and emotional calming make cigarette addiction so intractable. If a smoker is feeling anxious, that anxiety triggers the need for a cigarette to calm down. If the same person is feeling tired, he knows a cigarette will give him a boost. Cigarettes also serve as an appetite suppressant, making them popular with women. And because cigarettes are legal, smokers have developed hundreds of cues in their everyday environment that trigger lighting up.

Knowing how the habitual brain is responsible for most of our behavior helps us understand the apparently insane behavior of the addict. Responding to cues both in the environment and inside their bodies, addicts are reacting to powerful habits that are being triggered entirely outside of conscious awareness. The executive mind might be able to halt this process for a while, but at significant psychic cost. When the person gets tired or distracted, the habit comes back with a vengeance. In fact, the addicted mind conscripts the executive mind, which actively denies the influence of the drug.

Addiction is the extreme of habit formation. The feedback mechanism becomes broken, causing the afflicted to participate in self-harming behavior. Drugs such as nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol disrupt the normal habit-forming process by interfering with neurotransmitters and receptors. But this pernicious disease process shows us what we miss most of the time—that our unconscious habits control us. When this system functions properly, these same neurotransmitters and receptors train the brain to respond to the environment efficiently and effectively, without executive intervention. Although not as compulsive as an addiction, habitual behavior has a similar kind of force, which brings us to Google.

Mark Hutcheson—my researcher, project manager, personal day planner, and long-time friend—told me about this great new search engine in late 1998 or early 1999, shortly after Google’s first public, but still beta, release. I was working for a small research and consulting company, and the Internet had become a tremendous resource, making my trips to the library much less frequent. When I was doing my graduate work in the early 1990s, I started out using Archie to search the fledgling World Wide Web and progressed through a series of search engines, including Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista after leaving school. By 1999, I was using various search engines, one for business articles, another for science information, and another for items such as hotels and restaurants. When I started using Google, it quickly became my go-to search engine.

Google had the uncanny ability to return exactly what I was looking for as the first or second link, and it delivered the results with amazing speed. Along with the hundreds of millions who followed, I quickly became hooked on the algorithm created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin that ran on networked PCs instead of big mainframe computers. At first, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Google worked, but pretty soon I stopped thinking about Google at all. I no longer chose to use Google—I used it completely out of habit.

The thesis of this book is that marketplace success inevitably comes from this process. Google serves as an excellent example because it shows how the executive mind is initially involved in choice but rapidly hands off a task that has been repeatedly solved. Initially, I consciously decided to use Google based on a recommendation from a trusted source. The home page did not win me over, but the accuracy and speed of results were great. The combination of recommendation and personal experience caused me to develop a conscious preference, but the reliability of Google’s performance rapidly transferred this conscious choice into an unconscious habit.

The neural circuitry of my brain went through a physiological change. Associations were being made surrounding the context of a task and cues in the environment. For example, by creating a Google bookmark, I made it easier to automate its selection. The Google taskbar makes habit formation even more automatic. I progressively expanded my Google habit to my Treo phones and other Internet devices.

Google developed a brilliant business model to go with its habitual service—charging advertisers access to the millions of eyeballs continuously reviewing Google search results. In less than ten years, the company started by two Ph.D. students in a dorm room had a market capitalization more than 14 times that of GM simply by becoming our habitual choice for a routine activity.