Last to Show Up - the Frontal Lobe

Somewhere between 300 to 400 milliseconds after a sensory input - looking at a shelf full of salad dressing bottles in our example - you become consciously aware of what your brain has been working on for almost half a second. This conscious thought may come to you as a solution ("there's the one I want"), as an obstacle to achieving your goal ("where's the Newman's Own Caesar?"), as a choice that requires further deliberation ("do I go with the tasty hi-cal dressing or the lo-cal substitute?"), or as any of a million other thoughts ("I really need to pick up some shampoo").

What is important is that, unbeknownst to you, your brain has already narrowed down 11 million bits of informational input to 40 bits of consciousness in your working memory, and you are on your way to making a decision and a purchase. Activity now shifts to your frontal cortex, where conscious thought, deliberation, planning, and "that voice in your head" all take place.

You might expect the influence of pre-conscious processing to end here, but it does not. Extensive research has shown that the processes of pre-conscious activation continue to shape conscious thinking. All your processing of stimuli below the threshold of conscious awareness has an impact - what is called the facilitation of affectively congruent information and the inhibition of affectively incongruent information. As you make evaluations and conscious decisions - such as your decision to select one salad dressing over another - your decision-making process is subtly biased by all the information your brain has processed pre-consciously. For example, a difference as seemingly trivial as where text is written on a label can make one bottle stand out on the shelf while another gets lost in the noise of 100+ bottles vying for your attention. What causes you to notice one bottle over another may have nothing to do with why you think you chose that bottle.

In addtion, a field called behavioral economics tells us that even our most rational deliberative processes are shot through with unconscious influences and biases. Frame a choice as avoiding a loss and you are more likely to embrace it, frame the same choice as achieving a small gain and you might reject it. Your decisions are affected by what is called the availability bias. This is very important for brands. If an item more easily comes to mind - that is, if it is activated by a pre-conscious perceptual and emotional processes - it is more likely to be chosen.

The indisputable fact is this: even our most "rational" conscious processes are sigiificantly influenced by forces we do not consciously perceive. To understand why we do what we do as decision-makers, consumers, even as citizens, we need to understand how our brains are processing stimuli below the threshold of consciousness.

Neuroscience and neurometric measurement techniques provide a window into these extremely influential pre-conscious processes. For the first time, neuroscience puts tools in the hands of marketers and product developers that allow us to observe how the brain really works - from initial recognition of a stimulus through conscious deliberation, choice and action.