Free The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind by A. K. Pradeep Page A

cathedral effect. ” When entering a cathedral, our eyes are drawn upward within the structure. For signage, outdoor and print ads, place the object of interest at the top of the ad.
    r Use puzzles that are easily solved to draw in and delight the brain.
    Smell
    Our olfactory bulbs are, in fact, part of our limbic system, the deepest, most primitive part of our brains. They are separated by only two synapses from the amygdala, the seat of memory and emotion, and six synapses from the hippocampus, the brain organ responsible for storing memories. Carefully consider and create the scent that will be forever linked to your offering.
    Never discount the power of smell. Remember the smell of Play-doh?
    How about Listerine mouthwash? Now imagine them switched. End of story.
    Think of it: Every other sensory system must follow a long and winding path to the brain, full of transfers and hand-offs. But smells are mainlined directly into our centers for emotion and memory.
    Emotive and powerful, however, our olfactory senses are perhaps the least of all the weapons in our sensory arsenal. While 60 percent of our brain is devoted to sight, a scant 1 percent is devoted to smell. As the least necessary of our senses, Helen Keller called our sense of smell the “Fallen Angel.”
    How Smell Works
    When we inhale with every breath, we send particulates up through our nostrils, past the cilia that wave them along, and directly into the olfactory bulbs, which deliver them without further ado, into our brains. If we’re experiencing a familiar or highly evocative scent, the full memory of our first contact ignites both in our amygdala and hippocampus. For a friend, for example, stepping into a barn immediately transports her back to her days as a child, playing in her grandmother’s barn, with the warm, earthy scents of

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    The Buying Brain
    hay and horses, the buzz of the bugs, and the promise of lemonade all part of the picture. Another of my friends can eat a certain macaroon and find herself, for a few moments, back on the streets of Paris, the hot, sweet smells of pastry mixing with the metallic, slightly copperish smell of falling rain on cobblestone streets.
    In evolutionary terms, it’s little surprise that prey smells great to the hunter (steak, anyone?) and predator smells foul to the prey (if you ever get close enough to a large predatory cat, such as a lion, or even a large scavenger, like a hyena, you will be alarmed and possibly disgusted by their musk, their breath, or both). Our sense of smell was critical to our species’ survival. In its earliest uses, we relied on smell not only to find food, but also to find a healthy, genetically different mate and to identify our children in the dark. In the early days of medicine, smells allowed for the diagnosis of some diseases: Diabetes smelled like sugar, for instance, and measles like feathers. Trained dogs are our new partners in disease detection, able to sniff out melanoma, epileptic seizures, low blood sugar, and heart attacks. There is great interest in the medical field in developing new ways for dogs to sniff out disease in its earliest stages. By far, the best smellers are four-legged mammals. We have 5 million olfactory cells, while sheepdogs have 220 million.
    The Secret to Scent Memories
    The special memory system for senses, for things that you remember, is episodic memory. We have many other memory systems: procedural, semantic, short-term, long-term, and so forth.
    But, episodic memory is the function that may best be described as a mental time machine that stores memories about “ what, where, and when. ” This system is younger and more complex than our other memory systems, and is most developed in human beings.
    The episodic memory system is usually not mature until a child has reached roughly the age of five—not until then can the child recall