A New Yorker cartoon shows an elderly man grimacing as he laments to his wife, “Helen – just as I always feared. My hemispheres are drifting apart.”
Actually, advancing years tend to bring the hemispheres closer together. This is especially true for men who in the first half of life tend to be more highly lateralized to the left side of the brain than women. This is why in male-dominated cultures, women’s “intuition” is accorded less value than reasoning. Until the last quarter of the 20th century, women’s intuition was the but of countless jokes in movies, sitcoms and nightclub routines.
In later life, men as well as women tend to draw in more balanced fashion from both hemispheres in processing information. Men, in fact, become more feminine-like in their dependence on intuition, relying decisively less on reason than in their earlier years.
Given the majority status of men age 40 and older, it stands to reason that intuition is gaining in reputation. In fact, a number of books on the subject have come out in recent years, one of the latest of which is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which both describes and marvels at the frequency of uncanny decisions made in the unconscious regions of the mind through the processes of intuition.
The increased integration of the hemispheres in later life significantly alters how people parse and perceive reality. Young adults tend to categorize or differentiate objects of mental processes, reflecting left brain biased perceptions of reality. This disposes younger minds to place greater stress on quantitatively justifiable reasons for their decisions than do older minds.
In midlife and beyond, people tend to dedifferentiate objects of mental processes – that is, they look more for relational factors rather than categorical factors. This changes how they perceive everything from their relationships with others to the contents of marketing communications.
I can say without fear of error that it is a rare advertising creative who understands the differences in cognitive processes between people in different seasons of life. To most creatives, what a 25-year-old sees in an ad is essentially no different from what a 55-year-old sees in an ad.
Next: Why consumers in different seasons of life often fail to see the same things in an ad.
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