Peeking into Human Memory
Our memories seem simultaneously tangible and ephemeral. They define us, yet, under close examination, are surprisingly insubstantial. Companies spend billions to advertise their messages to potential and existing customers, relying on them to remember brands, slogans, claims, prices, and where to buy their products. But our memories are remarkably unreliable; as a result, much of our advertising money is wasted.
Russell Poldrack, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA studying the brain’s systems for learning, memory, decision making, and executive functions. A prodigious researcher, Poldrack was awarded the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions within a decade of completing his doctorate at the University of Illinois. Poldrack uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience, including fMRI, to tease out what is going on inside our brains as we think, learn, reason, and remember. I talked with Poldrack about the state of current research on memory and learning, and just what exactly we can know from fMRI studies.
“The early evidence for multiple memory systems came from amnesia patients who could not recall information previously presented, but could often perform normally on indirect tests of memory,” Poldrack explained. “The existence of multiple memory systems is now firmly established. The current thinking is that we have conscious memories for facts and events supported by a declarative memory system that relies upon the hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe structures. We also have unconscious learning that is supported by nondeclarative or procedural memory mechanisms that rely on widespread cortical and subcortical structures.”
Explicit memories are broken into semantic memories of facts and episodic memories of the events in our lives. Implicit memories include skills and habits, classic stimulus-response conditioning, and a fascinating process called priming, in which the brain seems to preload information based on hints picked up from the environment, in what some researchers call remembering the future.
Of particular interest to marketers and managers is that researchers have discovered that structures previously associated with the habitual mind play a significant role in how explicit memories are processed, stored, and retrieved.
Can technology read our minds?
The proliferation of articles with titles like, “This is your Brain on Politics,” and “This is your Brain on Brands,” gives the false impression that we can use neuroimaging technologies to read minds. I discussed what is knowable using functional magnetic resonance imagining with one of its most notable practitioners, UCLA’s Russell Poldrack.
“Functional magnetic resonance imaging doesn’t show us individual neurons firing,” Poldrack explained. “Instead, we see increased blood flow to those regions of the brain that are activated. Unfortunately, while the mental processes we’re interested in occur within a few hundred milliseconds, it takes seconds before the fMRIs can create an image. So what we are seeing in these images might simply be the aftermath of the cognitive processes we are trying to see.”
Because of this, researchers rely on a process of reverse-inference, where they work backwards to deduce what brain regions are involved with different types of tasks. While this methodology helps researchers formulate better hypotheses, it doesn’t ‘prove’ that a specific region of the brain performs a specific mental task. But journalists, and more than a few researchers, often report their findings as if inference was truth.
“Though reverse-inference can provide useful information, it is not a logically valid form of deductive reasoning,” Poldrack explained. “We are making guesses and hypotheses. We may think we know, but it’s not the truth.”
I asked him if it might be possible to read minds in the future. “It depends on what you mean by reading minds. We can with fairly good accuracy tell what kind of mental task you are performing, say reading words versus making decisions about money. However, we are very far away from being able to identify specific thoughts. I hate to say never, but someone will have to come up with new imaging technology. We’re talking at least decades.”
Poldrack encourages researchers to adopt a rigorous statistical methodology and stresses the importance of the peer review process to validate work done in this complicated area.
An example of the type of overstatement that worries Poldrack can be found in a New York Times Op-ed piece that appeared early in the 2008 presidential election cycle. A group of researchers claimed that a study they conducted with 20 subjects placed in an MRI machine revealed important insights in how voters viewed the candidates. Poldrack and a group of neuroscientists wrote a letter in response pointing out that the authors overstated the science. Tellingly, the original article stated that their research indicated that Mitt Romney shows great potential to win over voters, while Barack Obama and John McCain elicited very little reaction.
How the Executive Mind Remembers
If you were asked to name the capital of France, this would tap into your semantic memory. Remembering the trip you took to Paris accesses your episodic memory. But which type of memory is more influential in deciding what to buy? Before we can answer that question, we need to understand what makes us remember.
What is a memory? It is not a piece of information stored verbatim in your brain like data on a hard drive to be recalled whenever needed. Just as habits are formed by changes in the synaptic strength between neurons, memories involve a strengthening of connections between the specialized cells of the brain, as if our experiences are etched in our minds. Memories can vary in strength and accuracy, and they are susceptible to decay and error. Memories are not so much retrieved as they are re-created; they change each time they are brought into conscious awareness, as in an internal game of Rumor.
While I was a hospital administrator in San Antonio, I benefited regularly from the imprecision of memory. Whenever my competitor hospitals ran advertising, most notably television commercials, our phone rang. Potential patients were quite sure that it was my hospital that ran the ads, a notion we did not attempt to correct.
How many times have you seen a great commercial, whether for a car, a beer, a phone company, or a pair of shoes, but been unable to remember who made the ad? This is a pervasive phenomenon with advertising, yet it is only one of the great challenges facing businesses that want to communicate with the marketplace.
Nowhere is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes fuzzier than in our understanding of memory. Recent research has revealed the surprising magnitude of the role of emotion in executive-mind function, especially in how we select, encode, and retrieve information.
In the great world of diametrically opposed forces—yin and yang, north and south, male and female, Yankees and Red Sox fans—most would include emotion and reason. Emotion is hot, while reason is cold. Emotional decisions are viewed as poor and brash, while a reasoned decision is superior, or at least defensible. Counterintuitively, Elizabeth Phelps, Ph.D., of New York University shows that emotion is central to cognition, decision making, and memory.[7]
[7] Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Emotion and Cognition: Insights from Studies of the Human Amygdala,” Annual Review of Psychology, 57 (2006): 27–53.
Phelps summarizes the surprising insights gained from cognitive neuroscience that reveals how structures long associated with emotion are integral to all that we think of as executive (rational) mind functions. According to Phelps, emotions tell us what is important to remember, help us recall memories, and are essential to decision making.
Attention
As discussed earlier, memories are changes etched into our neural pathways. For the executive mind to store a memory, it must first focus attention on what is to be remembered. Attention is to explicit memory what repetition is to implicit memory. Attention is the mechanism we use to select what is important.
Yet how do we decide what stimuli to ignore and what to focus on? What apparatus alerts us to attend to a particular stimulus out of the thousands that bombard our senses at any particular moment? In large part, our emotions tell us what is worthy of attention.
If you were walking down your street and a dog jumped out at you, barking aggressively, it would capture your complete attention. Fear does a great job of concentrating the mind, thereby increasing the likelihood of survival. Other emotions play a similar role. Feelings of disgust keep us away from things that might be harmful. Empathetic feelings such as sadness, joy, love, and sorrow help bind us together, creating a societal culture far stronger than most would-be predators.
Our emotions help us pick out important aspects of the environment, whether they are threats or opportunities. Scanning a crowded party, we automatically pick out a familiar face without conscious effort. Similarly, in that same room, you can hear your name mentioned in a conversation from across the room. Emotion focuses our attention like a lens, prioritizing around threats, but is always open to opportunity.
The world we live in bears little resemblance to the world that shaped our evolution, but a marketer’s success depends on appealing to the same attention mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to pick up warning signals from the bush. This means creating associations between specific stimulation of our senses and our emotions’ threshold of indifference
Marketing’s early successes came from just these types of associations. Brands, logos, and jingles captured shoppers’ attention with emotion. By the turn of the twentieth century, several iconic brands had already been established, including P&G and Coke, and marketing as a discipline was born.
However, marketing’s success planted the seeds of its own destruction. Companies now pay for 4,500 messages per person per day in the United States, roughly one ad for every 14 seconds you are awake. Thousands of new products are released into grocery stores and department stores each year. Add to this an exponential growth in the number of information outlets and advertising media, and it is easy to see that customers are overwhelmed by the noise. Launching a new product nationally costs tens of millions of dollars. Of course, the more that a company spends, the more noise is added to the system and the more you must spend to rise above the noise. These aren’t called vicious cycles for nothing.
The original cognitive psychological meaning of habituation was the lack of response to a stimulus that originally caused a reaction. If you put a mouse in a cage with a stuffed owl, its initial response is great agitation. However, after repeated exposures, the mouse ignores the fake bird. If a brand fails to elicit an emotional response, it will fail to get attention. If you simply ratchet up the noise, the customer becomes accustomed to the increased volume and forms a new threshold of indifference that must be overcome.
To successfully cut through the noise, don’t be noise. Understand the emotional component of the brand to your customers, to attract their attention. Keep that emotional connection updated, to prevent your brand from becoming a stuffed owl.
Consolidating Memories
What separates memories that disappear within minutes, days, or weeks from those that last a lifetime? Again, emotion plays a critical role in consolidating memories from short to long term. Emotion prioritizes what is remembered, indexed by the type and intensity of that emotion. Most of us remember the details of our first kiss or where we were that fateful day the Twin Towers were destroyed. But we probably do not remember our 15th kiss or where we were on February 26, 1993, when a 1,500-pound bomb went off in a parking garage of the North Tower. The intensity of our emotional response marks the importance of an event. The more richly an event is categorized by emotion, the longer and more detailed it will be remembered.
Our assumptions of how we learn are shaped largely by our years spent in school. Sitting at a desk five hours a day, 180 days a year for 12 years, plus college and maybe even graduate school, powerfully persuades us that learning involves books, reading, and taking notes. We intentionally store facts and learn rules to solve written problems so we can do well on a test so that we can get a good job, buy a house and a nice car, and take cool trips. Undoubtedly, this helps us survive in the modern world, but this experience convinces us of something that is basically not true: We require language and writing to think and to learn.
Written language has existed for only 5,000 years. Widespread literacy did not emerge until after Gutenberg’s printing press in 1455. Studies show that only 15% of the general population cites reading as a preferred method of knowledge acquisition. Yet we bombard our customers with words in ads, flyers, and mailers, and on our web sites.
We think not in words, but in images. We attempt to translate our mental states into language the way a painter attempts to convey a scene with paint, brush, and canvas. No matter how talented the artist is, the painting is as pale a reflection of reality as our words are a pale reflection of our thoughts.
Another problem with communicating with words is that languages have an inherent ambiguity that is exacerbated by our individual and cultural experiences. Traveling through Southeast China, I was surprised when my interpreter, who was native Chinese, could not understand a conversation between two men from another province, even though they were speaking the common language, Mandarin (Putonghua). She explained to me that the language is highly context driven and that, without a shared background, she couldn’t really follow what they were saying. They spoke the same words but not the same language.
Not only is thought largely nonverbal, but so are most communications. Experts contend that as much as 80% of communication is nonverbal. We rely on body language, facial expressions, tone, and other clues in the environment to derive meaning. A new type of cell discovered in the 1990s appears to explain the neurological bases of this nonverbal exchange of information.
Mirror neurons were discovered accidentally in a research laboratory in Parma, Italy, by researchers monitoring motor neurons in monkeys. The researchers had isolated a particular neuron that fired whenever a monkey reached for a peanut, an experiment they had run numerous times. But then something very surprising happened. In view of the monkey, a hungry researcher reached for a peanut, and that isolated neuron in the monkey’s skull fired exactly as if the monkey were reaching for the peanut. To that particular neuron, the experience of reaching for the peanut was the same as someone else reaching for the peanut.
Upon discovering the same class of cells in humans, a new understanding of our social nature unfolded. If you have ever winced at someone else’s discomfort or flinched at a particularly hard hit while watching a football game, you’ve experienced mirror neurons connecting you to your fellow humans. Mirror neurons provide a direct connection among us, creating a level of intimacy that words can never capture.
The ability of an actor to get us to become emotionally involved in a story is largely a part of this neural empathy built into our brains. It is an entirely unconscious process that profoundly influences our behavior. Director Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ in a language foreign to the audience—in fact, a language unspoken for a thousand years. Yet James Caviezel’s portrayal of Jesus being beaten and humiliated was so powerful that audiences recoiled with each lash of the whip. Part of what makes us human is this powerful connection to others that makes us literally experience their feelings.
How, then, should you communicate with your customers? How do you get customers, who are overwhelmed with sensory input, to remember your web site or where to find you in the department store? Multiple methods exist, and they vary in terms of cost and effectiveness. We expand on this topic in Chapter 6, “Habit and Marketing Management,” but it is worth touching upon these ideas while these concepts are fresh.
The brute-force way to remember something is through repetition. If you repeat any message enough times, it will be remembered. Irritating but effective commercials such as “Ring Around the Collar” and “Head On” get us to remember their slogan by endless repetitions. We can also encase our message in easily remembered packages such as rhymes, alliteration, and jingles. The two primary limitations of this approach are expense and complexity. Repeating a message enough times for a disinterested audience to remember it is prohibitively expensive for all but the most widely used brands. The other problem with repetition is that the message cannot be very complex. The longer the message, the more repetitions are required for it to become etched into memory. This is why experts recommend limiting slogans to three words (Just Do It)—four at the most (Soup Is Good Food).
Alternatively, we can communicate more effectively through the use of story, metaphor, and emotion. Although advertisers have long understood this, their messages are often painted on rather than baked in. Flip through any magazine, and you will encounter an emotion-filled picture that has little to say about the product being advertised. Advertisers know that emotionally powerful images such as a baby, attractive face or a puppy will get your attention, but the message must somehow relate to the image if the ad is to work. Michelin’s ad campaign showing babies riding in tires grabs attention, but the slogan drives the point: “Because so much is riding on your tires.” The emotional content is carried over from the ad to the product.
Storing memories is a process. The more richly the information is contextualized, the more it will be remembered. Create a process that connects the brand meaningfully to an emotion in your communications. Evaluate your reliance on text, even to your business customers.
But after it’s stored, how do we get our customers to recall the information when we need them to?
Retrieving Memories
Not only does emotion get us to pay attention and let us know what to remember, but it also facilitates recall. In numerous research studies, emotionally charged images, words, and stories are remembered better and longer than their neutral counterparts. The link between memory and emotion appears to be a two-way street. Just as recalling strong emotions can facilitate memory of events, memory of events can cue those same emotions.
The great challenge is linking the retrieval of specific memories at critical times during purchase and consumption (or utilization). To put this into Nielsen’s DeltQual framework, how do we get customers to remember the persuasive part of our communications during a Delta moment when they are not shopping on autopilot?
We must avoid the mental model that a customer makes a rational comparison of product attributes, as if making a list of pros and cons. Most decisions happen very rapidly, with significant processing done outside conscious awareness. My editor told me of research that suggests that a book has three seconds to grab a reader’s attention in the store, and that book buyers for the major chains give a book only 20 seconds of attention before deciding whether to buy. So much for not judging a book by its cover.
These quick decisions are not bad decisions; they are simply a strategy for survival in a world cluttered with decisions (just look at the number of coffee choices at Starbucks). To make sure customers tap into the decision rules that include considering your product, make sure you understand their decision rules. You must then communicate that your product fulfills that rule, preferably with an emotional tag. Then reinforce that message via the distribution channel, whether that is in a store, from a salesperson, or on the Web.
Managers and marketers who try to convince potential customers of their product’s superiority by listing product attributes will be as successful as a geeky suitor asking out a cheerleader by including his resumé, SAT scores, and the net present value of his future earnings potential. Remember, your customer is looking for shortcuts to good decisions.
Our ability to store and retrieve conscious memories is also a function of mood, another unconscious state that colors our perception. We store more memories when we are in a good mood than in bad one. Ads close to upbeat stories have a better chance of being remembered than ones that follow tragic news.
Our current mood also impacts what we remember. We recall memories better when our mood at retrieval matches our mood at storage.
Why are our memories so wrapped up in our emotions? The relationship between emotion and memory is easy to understand by looking at the limbic region. The seahorse (hippocampus) is responsible for consolidating episodic memories, while the almond (amygdala) is the center for strong emotion. However, these are not distinct structures. The amygdala is a small bulb that hangs off the end of the hippocampus. Their co-location would suggest that their functions would be interrelated, and fMRI studies reveal this to be so. Only because we assumed for so long that emotion and reason were separate have we failed to integrate them as well as we might in our approach to the marketplace.
Managers and marketers need to understand the intimate relationship between memory, emotion, and decision-making. Customers are trying to create shortcuts to simplify their lives. Do not add to their burden, and do not judge them. Make it easy for them to choose your product and then keep using it without having to think about it.