The most successful brands in the world have an imprint on our psychology and feel like family members to us.
A survey on Apple (iOS) and Samsung (Android) users revealed that Apple users have a high rate of pride and empathy towards the brand, while Samsung users were mostly neutral. It proved how Apple’s marketing department has succeeded in forming a deep, emotional connection with customers.

The Impact On Our Psychology

Having a strong emotional connection with the brand makes many of us succumb to the famous reality distortion field, where we are absolutely okay with paying top dollar for their products.
The truth is we are not buying the product, but are enhancing our own identity due to the successful marketing strategies that we have now imbibed in us.
By choosing certain brands, we build and maintain our own identity and broadcast a fine-tuned version of ourselves to others.

Brands Make Our Identity

We need to be aware of the reality distortion field of many advertising campaigns and slow down before making any impulsive decisions based on our emotions. We need to seriously consider why we are buying a certain product and if there is a practical need to upgrade.

Making Smart Decisions

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How Apple and Nike have branded your brain

Human sexual desire: Is monogamy natural?

The teenage brain: Why some years are (a lot) crazier than others

A new episode of "Your Brain on Money" illuminates the strange world of consumer behavior and explores how brands can wreak havoc on our ability to make rational decisions.

<ul><li>Effective branding can not only change how you feel about a company, it can actually change how your brain is wired. </li><li>Our new series "Your Brain on Money," created in partnership with Million Stories, recently explored the surprising ways brands can affect our behavior. </li><li>Brands aren't going away. But you can make smarter decisions by slowing down and asking yourself why you're making a particular purchase. </li> </ul>

How Apple and Nike have branded your brain | Your Brain on Money | Big Think <a href="https://youtu.be/4eIDBV4Mpek">youtu.be </a>

Brands can manipulate our brains in surprisingly profound ways. They can change how we conceptualize ourselves and how we broadcast our identities out to the social world. They can make us feel emotions that have nothing to do with the functions of their products. And they can even sort us into tribes.

To grasp the power of brands, look to Apple. In the 1990s, the company was struggling to compete with Microsoft over the personal computer market. Despite flirting with bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, Apple turned itself around to eventually become the most valuable company in the world.

That early-stage success wasn't due to superior products.

"People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company," John Sculley, a former Apple marketing executive, told The Guardian in 1997. "It was the marketing company of the decade."

So, how exactly does branding make people willing to wait hours in line to buy a $1,000 smartphone, or pay exorbitant prices for a pair of sneakers?

For more than a century, brands have capitalized on the fact that effective marketing is much more than simply touting the merits of a product. Some ads have nothing to do with the product at all. In 1871, for example, Pearl Tobacco started advertising their cigarettes through <a href="https://mbenisz.wordpress.com/history-of-sex-in-advertising/">branded posters and trading cards </a>that featured exposed women, a trend that continues to this day.

It's crude, sure. But research shows that it's also remarkably effective, even on monkeys. Why? The answer seems to center on how our brains pay special attention to information from the social world.

"In theory, ads that associate sex or status with specific brands or products activate the brain mechanisms that prioritize social information, and turning on this switch may bias us toward the product," wrote neuroscience professor Michael Platt for <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-advertising/">Scientific American. </a>

Brands can burrow themselves deep into our subconscious. Through ad campaigns, <a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/cracking-code-brand-growth/">brands can form a web of associations and memories </a>in our brains. When these connections are robust and positive, it can change our behavior, nudging us to make "no-brainer" purchases when we encounter the brand at the store.

<img>Nike store <a href="https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/205171594/thamkc?load_type=author&prev_url=detail">ThamKC </a>

It's a marketing principle that's related to the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In his book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555">Thinking Fast and Slow </a>", Kahneman separates thinking into two broad categories, or systems:

<ul><li>System 1 is fast and automatic, requiring little effort or voluntary control. </li><li>System 2 is slow and requires subjective deliberation and logic. </li> </ul>

Brands that tap into "system 1" are likely to dominate the competition. After all, it's far easier for us as consumers to automatically reach for a familiar brand than it is to analyze all of the available information and make an informed choice. Still, the most successful brands can have an even deeper impact on our psychology, one that causes us to conceptualize them as something like a family member.

Apple has one of the most loyal customer bases in the world, with its brand loyalty hitting an all-time high earlier this year, according to a <a href="https://www.sellcell.com/blog/cell-phone-brand-loyalty-2021/">SellCell survey </a>of more than 5,000 U.S.-based smartphone users.

Qualitatively, how does that loyalty compare to Samsung users? To find out, Platt and his team conducted a study in which functional magnetic <a href="https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Leaders-Brain-Intro.pdf">resonance imaging </a>scanned the brains of Samsung and Apple users as they viewed positive, negative, and neutral news about each company. The results revealed stark differences between the two groups, as Platt wrote in <a href="https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Leaders-Brain-Intro.pdf">"The Leader's Brain" </a>:

"Apple users showed empathy for their own brand: The reward-related areas of the brain were activated by good news about Apple, and the pain and negative feeling parts of the brain were activated by bad news. They were neutral about any kind of Samsung news. This is exactly what we see when people empathize with other people—particularly their family and friends—but don't feel the joy and pain of people they don't know."

Meanwhile, Samsung users didn't show any significant pain- or pleasure-related brain activity when they saw good or bad news about the company.

"Interestingly, though, the pain areas were activated by good news about Apple, and the reward areas were activated by bad news about the rival company—some serious schadenfreude, or "reverse empathy," Platt wrote.

The results suggest a fundamental difference between the brands: Apple has formed strong emotional and social connections with consumers, Samsung has not.

Does having a strong connection with a brand justify paying higher prices for their products? Maybe. You could have a strong connection with Apple or Nike and simultaneously think the quality of their products justifies the price.

But beyond product quality lies identity. People have long used objects and clothing to express themselves and signal their affiliation with groups. From <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618215005509">prehistoric seashell jewelry </a>to Air Jordans, the things people wear and associate with signal a lot of information about how they conceptualize themselves.

Since the 1950s, researchers have examined the relationship between self-image and brand preferences. This body of research has generally found that consumers tend to prefer brands whose products fit well with their self-image, a concept known as <a href="https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/11876/volumes/ap06/AP%20-%2006">self-image congruity </a>.

By choosing brands that don't disrupt their self-image, consumers are able not only to express themselves personally, but also broadcast a specific version of themselves into the social world. That might sound self-involved. But on the other hand, humans are social creatures who use information from the social world to make decisions, so it's virtually impossible for us not to make inferences about people based on how they present themselves.

Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Big Think:

"When I make choices about different brands, I'm choosing to create an identity. When I put that shirt on, when I put that shirt on — those jeans, that hat — someone is going to form an impression about what I'm about. So, if I'm choosing Nike over Under Armour, I'm choosing a kind of different way to express affiliation with sport. The Nike thing is about performance. The Under Armour thing is about the underdog. I have to choose which of these different conceptual pathways is most consistent with where I am in my life."

Brands may have some power over us when we're facing a purchasing decision. So, considering brands aren't going away, what can we do to make better choices? The best strategy might be to slow down and try to avoid making "automatic" purchasing decisions that are characteristic of Kahneman's fast "system 1" mode of thinking.

"I think it's important to always pause and think a little bit about, "Okay, why am I buying this product?" Platt said.

As for getting out of the brand game altogether? Good luck.

"I've heard lots of people push back and say, "I'm not into brands,"" Reed II said. "I take a very different view. In some senses, they're not doing anything different than what someone who affiliates with a brand is doing. They have a brand. It's just an anti-brand brand."

Every 27.5 million years, the Earth’s heart beats catastrophically

Titanosaur footprints discovered on the roof of a French cave

CT scans of shark intestines find Nikola Tesla’s one-way valve

Mystery anomaly weakens Earth's magnetic field, report scientists

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Geologists discover a rhythm to major geologic events.

<ul><li>It appears that Earth has a geologic "pulse," with clusters of major events occurring every 27.5 million years. </li><li> Working with the most accurate dating methods available, the authors of the study constructed a new history of the last 260 million years. </li><li>Exactly why these cycles occur remains unknown, but there are some interesting theories. </li> </ul>

Our hearts beat at a resting rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute. Lots of other things pulse, too. The colors we see and the pitches we hear, for example, are due to the different wave frequencies ("pulses") of light and sound waves.

Now, a study in the journal <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987121001092">Geoscience Frontiers </a>finds that Earth itself has a pulse, with one "beat" every 27.5 million years. That's the rate at which major geological events have been occurring as far back as geologists can tell.

<img>Credit:<a href="https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/200831490/jagoush?load_type=author&prev_url=detail">Jagoush </a>/ Adobe Stock

<a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2021/june/earth-pulse.html">According </a>to lead author and geologist Michael Rampino of New York University's Department of Biology, "Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random."

The new study is not the first time that there's been a suggestion of a planetary geologic cycle, but it's only with recent refinements in radioisotopic dating techniques that there's evidence supporting the theory. The authors of the study collected the latest, best dating for 89 known geologic events over the last 260 million years:

<ul><li>29 sea level fluctuations </li><li>12 marine extinctions </li><li>9 land-based extinctions </li><li>10 periods of low ocean oxygenation </li><li>13 gigantic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_basalt">flood basalt </a>volcanic eruptions </li><li>8 changes in the rate of seafloor spread </li><li>8 times there were global pulsations in interplate magmatism </li> </ul>

The dates provided the scientists a new timetable of Earth's geologic history.

<img>Credit: <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2021/june/earth-pulse.html">New York University </a>

Putting all the events together, the scientists performed a series of statistical analyses that revealed that events tend to cluster around 10 different dates, with peak activity occurring every 27.5 million years. Between the ten busy periods, the number of events dropped sharply, approaching zero.

Perhaps the most fascinating question that remains unanswered for now is exactly why this is happening. The authors of the study suggest two possibilities:

"The correlations and cyclicity seen in the geologic episodes may be entirely a function of global internal Earth dynamics affecting global tectonics and climate, but similar cycles in the Earth's orbit in the Solar System and in the Galaxy might be pacing these events. Whatever the origins of these cyclical episodes, their occurrences support the case for a largely periodic, coordinated, and intermittently catastrophic geologic record, which is quite different from the views held by most geologists."

Assuming the researchers' calculations are at least roughly correct — the authors note that different statistical formulas may result in further refinement of their conclusions — there's no need to worry that we're about to be thumped by another planetary heartbeat. The last occurred some seven million years ago, meaning the next won't happen for about another 20 million years.

A new study tested to what extent dogs can sense human deception.

Is humanity's best friend catching on to our shenanigans? Researchers at the University of Vienna discovered that dogs can in certain cases know when people are lying.

The scientists carried out a study with hundreds of dogs to determine to what extent dogs could spot deception. The team's new<a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0906">paper </a>, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B , outlined experiments that tested whether dogs, like humans, have some inner sense of how to assess truthfulness.

As the researchers wrote in their<a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0906">paper </a>, "Among non-primates, dogs (Canis familiaris ) constitute a particularly interesting case, as their social environment has been shared with humans for at least 14,000 years. For this reason, dogs have been considered as a model species for the comparative investigation of socio-cognitive abilities." The investigation focused specifically on understanding if dogs were "sensitive to some mental or psychological states of humans."

The experiments involved 260 dogs, which were made to listen to advice from a human "communicator" whom they did not know. The human told them which one of two bowls had a treat hidden inside by touching it and saying, "Look, this is very good!" If the dogs took the person's advice, they would get the treat.

Once they established the trust of the dogs, the researchers then complicated the experience by letting dogs watch another human that they did not know transfer the treat from one bowl to another. In some cases, the original communicator would also be present to watch but not always.

The findings revealed that half of the dogs did not follow the advice of the communicator if that person was not present when the food was switched to a different bowl. The dogs had a sense that this human could not have known the true location of the treat. Furthermore, two-thirds of the dogs ignored the human's suggestion if she did see the food switch but pointed to the wrong bowl. The dogs figured out the human was lying to them.

<img>Photos of experiments showing the dog, human communicator, and person hiding the treat. Credit: Lucrezia Lonardo et al / Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We thought dogs would behave like children under age five and apes, but now we speculate that perhaps dogs can understand when someone is being deceitful," co-author Ludwig Huber from the University of Vienna told <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284611-dogs-will-ignore-you-if-they-know-you-are-lying-unlike-young-children/">New Scientist </a>. "Maybe they think, 'This person has the same knowledge as me, and is nevertheless giving me the wrong [information].' It's possible they could see that as intentionally misleading, which is lying."

This is not the first time such experiments have been carried out. Previously, children under age five, macaques, and chimps were tested in a similar way. It turned out that children and other animals were more likely than dogs to listen to the advice of the liars. Notably, among the dogs, terriers were found to be more like children and apes, more eagerly following false suggestions.

Interoception: how to improve your "gut feeling"

When we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose; but when we listen to the body, we gain a winning edge.

<ul><li>Our surroundings contain far more information than our conscious minds can process. </li><li>Our non-conscious minds are constantly gathering information and identifying patterns. </li><li>By being interoceptively attuned — that is, aware of the inner state of the body — we can tap into what our non-conscious mind is trying to tell us. </li> </ul>

The following is an adapted excerpt from the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665">The Extended Mind </a>. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

If you'd like to make smarter choices and sounder decisions — and who doesn't? — you might want to take advantage of a resource you already have close at hand: your interoception . Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body. Just as we have sensors that take in information from the outside world (retinas, cochleas, taste buds, olfactory bulbs), we have sensors inside our bodies that send our brains a constant flow of data from within. These sensations are generated in places all over the body — in our internal organs, in our muscles, even in our bones — and then travel via multiple pathways to a structure in the brain called the insula. Such internal reports are merged with several other streams of information — our active thoughts and memories, sensory inputs gathered from the external world — and integrated into a single snapshot of our present condition, a sense of "how I feel" in the moment, as well as a sense of the actions we must take to maintain a state of internal balance.

To understand the role interoception can play in smart decision-making, it's important to know that the world is full of far more information than our conscious minds can process. However, we are also able to collect and store the volumes of information we encounter on a non-conscious basis. As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things — but we're typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that's usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses.

A study led by cognitive scientist Pawel Lewicki demonstrates this process in microcosm. Participants in Lewicki's experiment were directed to watch a computer screen on which a cross-shaped target would appear, then disappear, then reappear in a new location; periodically they were asked to predict where the target would show up next. Over the course of several hours of exposure to the target's movements, the participants' predictions grew more and more accurate. They had figured out the pattern behind the target's peregrinations. But they could not put this knowledge into words, even when the experimenters offered them money to do so. The subjects were not able to describe "anything even close to the real nature" of the pattern, Lewicki observes. The movements of the target operated according to a pattern too complex for the conscious mind to accommodate — but the capacious realm that lies below consciousness was more than roomy enough to contain it.

"Nonconscious information acquisition," as Lewicki calls it, along with the ensuing application of such information, is happening in our lives all the time. As we navigate a new situation, we're scrolling through our mental archive of stored patterns from the past, checking for ones that apply to our current circumstances. We're not aware that these searches are under way; as Lewicki observes, "The human cognitive system is not equipped to handle such tasks on the consciously controlled level." He adds, "Our conscious thinking needs to rely on notes and flowcharts and lists of 'if-then' statements — or on computers — to do the same job which our non-consciously operating processing algorithms can do without external help, and instantly."

But — if our knowledge of these patterns is not conscious, how then can we make use of it? The answer is that, when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it's our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our "somatic rudder.") Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.

Such interoceptive prodding was visible during a gambling game that formed the basis of an experiment led by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, a professor at the University of Southern California. In the game, presented on a computer screen, players were given a starting purse of two thousand "dollars" and were shown four decks of digital cards. Their task, they were told, was to turn the cards in the decks face-up, choosing which decks to draw from such that they would lose the least amount of money and win the most. As they started clicking to turn over cards, players began encountering rewards — bonuses of $50 here, $100 there — and also penalties, in which small or large amounts of money were taken away. What the experimenters had arranged, but the players were not told, was that decks A and B were "bad" — they held lots of large penalties in store — and decks C and D were "good," bestowing more rewards than penalties over time.

How Our Brains Feel Emotion | Antonio Damasio | Big Think <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsSv1KzdiWU">www.youtube.com </a>

As they played the game, the participants' state of physiological arousal was monitored via electrodes attached to their fingers; these electrodes kept track of their level of "skin conductance." When our nervous systems are stimulated by an awareness of potential threat, we start to perspire in a barely perceptible way. This slight sheen of sweat momentarily turns our skin into a better conductor of electricity. Researchers can thus use skin conductance as a measure of nervous system arousal. Looking over the data collected by the skin sensors, Damasio and his colleagues noticed something interesting: after the participants had been playing for a short while, their skin conductance began to spike when they contemplated clicking on the bad decks of cards. Even more striking, the players started avoiding the bad decks, gravitating increasingly to the good decks. As in the Lewicki study, subjects got better at the task over time, losing less and winning more.

Yet interviews with the participants showed that they had no awareness of why they had begun choosing some decks over others until late in the game, long after their skin conductance had started flaring. By card 10 (about forty-five seconds into the game), measures of skin conductance showed that their bodies were wise to the way the game was rigged. But even ten turns later — on card 20 — "all indicated that they did not have a clue about what was going on," the researchers noted. It took until card 50 was turned, and several minutes had elapsed, for all the participants to express a conscious hunch that decks A and B were riskier. Their bodies figured it out long before their brains did. Subsequent studies supplied an additional, and crucial, finding: players who were more interoceptively aware were more apt to make smart choices within the game. For them, the body's wise counsel came through loud and clear.

Damasio's fast-paced game shows us something important. The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle. The benefits of the body's intervention extend well beyond winning a card game; the real world, after all, is full of dynamic and uncertain situations, in which there is no time to ponder all the pros and cons. When we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose — but when we listen to the body, we gain a winning edge.

The neuroscience of branding

The Impact On Our Psychology

Brands Make Our Identity

Making Smart Decisions

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