The Network Always Wins: How to Influence Customers, Stay Relevant, and Transform Your Organization to Move Faster than the Market by Peter Hinssen

Author:Peter Hinssen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2015-03-26T14:00:00+00:00

FEAR, TRUST, AND HORMONES

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Joseph LeDoux is the lead singer of the Amygdaloids, a New York City rock band, whose 2007 debut album was called Heavy Mental. Chances are you’ve never heard of the band, which is entirely made up of researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience. The band is named after the amygdalae, almond-shaped parts of your brain that have been shown to perform a primary role in the processing of memory and emotional reactions. LeDoux is one of the key neuroscientists doing research in this field.

LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University, also directs the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, which is devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans. He pioneered the study of emotions as a biological phenomenon. His research on anxiety demonstrated that our bodies take action without our minds even knowing. “The conscious brain gets all the attention, but consciousness is but a small part of what the brain does, and it’s a slave to everything that works beneath it.”11

LeDoux’s findings basically showed that the amygdalae can literally hijack our mind and body, causing us to respond while completely bypassing the cerebral cortex, where our conscious awareness resides.

Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California said it beautifully: “Our emotions influence our thinking much more than our thinking influences our emotions.” Damasio, who heads up the Brain and Creativity Institute, argues that René Descartes’ mistake was the dualist separation of rationality and emotion. (Descartes famously coined the phrase cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” He was a firm believer in the power of the rational brain.) Damasio and LeDoux, four hundred years later, put the emotions and unconscious before the logic.12

We now seem to understand that our behavior, our response to stimuli, information, and marketing, isn’t as logical or as cerebral as we would expect. We aren’t simple beings who can be controlled and manipulated with simple algorithms and rules. We are complex organisms, with a bias toward unconscious processing of inputs. We make decisions and choices based on our intricate systems of chemical reactions. To succeed today, marketers need to understand that.

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