The Challenge of Attention

At every second of every day, your brain is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling about 11 million bits of information. Of that 11 million bits, only about 40 bits make it into your subjective consciousness - that is, where you perceive yourself as "thinking" about something. That massive amount of data reduction is the primary occupation of your brain (in addition to incidentals like keeping your heart beating). It draws you toward potentially rewarding stimuli (like an ice cream cone on a hot day) and away from potentially dangerous stimuli (like that spider crawling up your arm).

Out of this continuous flow of sensory input, your brain pulls out what seems most important and in effect says "here, pay attention to THIS!".

If you think about thinking from this perspective, it is obvious that there is a huge amount of processing going on before you become aware of anything. It is also obvious that you cannot tell a consumer researcher about this processing, because you are literally not aware of it - it is pre-conscious thought.

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have spent decades developing clever experiments and measurement techniques to explore this world of pre-conscious processing. They have found, not surprisingly, that these processes affect how we perceive, notice, assess, and interact with our world in multiple and profound ways.

Let's take a look at a seemingly simple example that is of great relevance to marketers and product developers - how do you pick out a bottle of salad dressing at the grocery store?