How the Brain Decides What Warrants Your Conscious Attention

Your brain is an amazing piece of organic machinery. Believe it or not, it’s 80 percent water – more liquid than your blood is. Yet within that 3-pound gelatinous mass are 100 billion neurons, each connected to from 5,000 to 50,000 other neurons. If you do the math of possible connections, you’ll come up with a number that exceeds the total number of atoms in the entire known universe.

In any event, a lot of neurons get involved when a consumer experiences a message you’ve sent out into the marketplace. The first task facing the unconscious brain is to decide what to send to your conscious mind because the senses send more information into the space between your ears than your conscious mind can process. Consider, for example, that only about a trillionth of the information that lands on the surface of your eyes ever reaches consciousness. And that’s just one sense of the total five.

The unconscious brain conducts information triage to separate what’s worth thinking about from what doesn’t matter all that much. That’s what the brain does in the .2 to .8 of a second before information from the senses reaches the conscious mind. And what is there about something that causes the brain to send a report of what it has observed to the conscious mind?

One word: Relevance. Given the paltry amount of RAM your conscious mind has, most of what enters the brain gets pushed to the side as NIETTA – not important enough to think about.

Say you are gathered around the office coffee pot, talking with a colleague. Suddenly, you hear your name in another conversation. Your brain was listening to that other conversation all along. But until your name was mentioned, it didn’t think it should interrupt your conversation with your colleague.

Bottom line:

• The senses detect;
• The brain selects;
• The mind elects.

In other words, your conscious mind – often called the Executive Officer in cognitive science – does not determine what it thinks about. Instead, it processes information the unconscious brain sends forward. Isn’t that like what happens in a big corporation? The CEO makes decisions every day based on staff work-ups that occur outside his field of corporate awareness. Clearly, the CEO is in control of the course of the corporation even though he knows very little about day-to-day, hour-by-hour, miunte-by-minute goings on deep in the bowels of his organization.

All of this adds up to a rather complex picture of how we take in information, process it and make decisions, whether in our jobs, in the marketplace or in our personal lives.

As a marketeer, the better you understand this picture, obviously the more often what you do will connect with consumers as relevant to them – enough so that your message will survive information triage.

I’ll talk a bit about that in my next post.

Next: How to know what is most relevant to consumers

Comments

[Lisa]

This reminded me of the "Power of Impossible Thinking" book that I've read on the plane few weeks ago. An intriguing book that explores how our thinking gets in the way of many things we do and how brain decides which mental model to use and how to deal with context so we get the appropriate picture, using cognitive experimenting to expand our ability to perceive other directions, dismantling the old way, bridging disconnects, and adapting to the world. I hope you’ll find this book of interest as I did.

[David Wolfe]

Lisa,

Yes, you're right -- often times truth is what we have until we start thinking about it and transforming it into fiction. This is what Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink is getting at, although there are much better recent books on the subject of intuition.

Thanks for your comments and Happy Holidays,

DBW