How marketing and advertising appeal to the associative nature of the brain

While there had been a long tradition of giving rings as a commitment to marry, the custom of giving diamond engagement rings was in large part manufactured by one of the most effective marketing campaigns in history . In the early 1900s, diamond sales were declining, posing a serious problem for the company that essentially had control over the diamond market. In 1938, this company hired an advertising agency. Which proposed reshaping social attitudes toward diamonds? As well as magazines showing film stars draped in diamonds, the agency arranged for movies to incorporate diamond engagement rings into their plots. The campaign culminated with the slogan:' A diamond is forever. At the time, the approach was unique. Rather than pushing a brand, the objective was to promote diamonds as the symbol of everlasting love. This was achieved by exploiting the associative nature of the brain: associating neurons! Activated by the concept of' love ' with neurons that encoded the concept of “diamonds. By 1941, diamond sales had increased by 55 %.

Advertising comes in many forms, from blatant neon signs to subtly embedded products in movies. In each case, the goal is to mould our habits, desires and opinions. Our visual system is targeted by an avalanche of information on the internet, street posters, and billboards and in movie theatres. Our auditory system submits to catchy radio jingles and telemarketers. More surreptitiously, our olfactory system is targeted by variations of vanilla and citrus perfumes aimed at enticing US to linger in a retail outlet. It is difficult to measure how effective these campaigns are, but as in the ' A diamond is forever ’ campaign, they can be so successful that they change the fabric of our culture. In the case of bottled water, we are swayed by advertising into paying for something that we can obtain for free. Most people cannot distinguish bottled from tap water, much less between brands of bottled water, which is why you rarely hear of a bottled water company proposing a blind taste test.

So why is marketing such an effective mind - control technique? It is interesting to consider whether other animals exhibit anything analogous to humans ' susceptibility to advertising. If we provide a lab rat with two types of cereal, it will consume approximately the same amount of each. However, if we put that rat with another rat that spent its day eating just one type, when faced with a choice, our rat will now show a preference for the same type as the other rat was eating. Psychologists call this ' socially transmitted food preference ‘.

What many regard as the first documented examples of cultural learning in primates started with a clever monkey that lived in a colony of Japanese monkeys on the island of Koshima. She began taking her dirt - covered sweet potatoes to the river to wash them before eating them. Upon seeing this, a few 11 other open - minded monkeys picked up on the idea. Potato washing then spread from monkey to monkey and, over the course of a few years, most monkeys were eating clean potatoes. Humans are clearly not the only animals to engage in imitation and social learning.

Learning by observation can be an extraordinarily valuable brain feature, this is how we learn to communicate and perform motor skills as well as deal with many everyday problems. For example, a newcomer struggling to purchase tickets and navigate the subway system in a foreign city may step back to learn from the people nearby. Humans and other primates exhibit multiple forms of imitative learning and this is called cultural transmission.

A component of advertising relies on the marketer's ability to tap into the brain’s propensity for imitation. Anybody who has watched TV knows advertisements are disproportionately populated with attractive, successful looking individuals. If we are going to imitate someone, we are more inclined to imitate those who appear to be popular and appealing.

Although not all researchers are convinced by the findings, a number of studies indicate that some animals also imitate dominant members of their group. Primatologist Frans de Waal provides anecdotal evidence of preferential imitation among chimpanzees. He noted that in one particular group the dominant male was hurt and was limping as a result. Soon unlikely if a non-dominant male had been injured.

Imitation is undoubtedly an invaluable ability, but often our propensity to imitate generalises indiscriminately, leading to poor decisions. When athlete Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump by jumping over the bar backward in 1968, imitators obviously copied his jumping style, not his brand of sports shoes. However, today, sports people appear in advertisements asking US to buy the laptops or sports drinks that they promote. Rationally, we know these people's success did not depend on these products, so it seems our propensity to purchase products relates more to neural programs that evolved to encourage imitation of those further up the social ladder. Today , companies engage in stealth marketing campaigns in which people are paid to frequent bars or websites to covertly promote certain products , Companies also perform studies in which they track the eye movements of people viewing displays , and carefully craft names , packages and jingles associated with their products. While we may like to believe that manipulation on a grand scale would not be possible, that's not to say that advertising is innately harmful. To the contrary, the marketing of products or ideas is essential to human culture. The point is that we should ensure our choices reflect our actual goals and desires, and we must distinguish between the dissemination of information which is for our own good, and our manipulation for the benefit of companies

A Parrots are found across the tropic and in all southern hemisphere continents except Antarctica, but nowhere do they display such a richness of diversity and form as in Australia. One-sixth of the world's 345 parrot species are found there, and Australia has long been renowned for the number and variety of its parrots.

B In the 16th century, the German cartographer Mercator made a world map that included a place, somewhere near present-day Australia, that he named Terra Psittacorum - the Land of Parrots - and the first European settlers in Australia often referred to the country as Parrot Land. In 1865, the celebrated British naturalist and wildlife artist John Gould said: "No group of birds gives Australia so tropical and benign an air as the numerous species of this great family by which it is tenanted.

C Parrots are descendants of an ancient line. Due to their great diversity, and since most species inhabit Africa, Australia and South America, it seems almost certain that parrots originated millions of years ago on the ancient southern continent of Gondwana, before it broke up into the separate southern hemisphere continents we know today. Much of Gondwana comprised vast rainforests intersected by huge slow-flowing rivers and expansive lakes, but by eight million years ago, great changes were underway. The center of the continent of Australia had begun to dry out, and the rainforests that once covered it gradually contracted to the continental margins, where, to a limited extent, they still exist today.

D The creatures that remained in those shrinking rainforests had to adapt to the drier conditions or face extinction. Reacting to these desperate circumstances, the parrot family, typically found in jungles in other parts of the world, has populated some of Australia's harshest environments. The parrots spread from ancestral forests through eucalypt woodlands to colonies the central deserts of Australia, and as a consequence they diversified into a wide range of species with adaptations that reflect the many changes animals and plants had to make to survive in these areas.

E These evolutionary pressures helped mould keratin, the substance from which breaks are made into a range of tools capable of gathering the new food types favored by various species of parrot. The size of a parrot's short, blunt beak and the length of that beak's do curved upper section are related to the type of food each species eats. Some have comparatively long beaks that are perfect for extracting seeds from fruit; others have broader and stronger beaks that are designed for cracking hard seeds.

F Differently shaped beaks are not the only adaptations that have been made during the developing relationship between parrots and their food plants. Like all of Australia's many honey eating birds, the rainbow-coloured lorikeets and the flowers on which they feed have long co­evolved with features such as the shape and colour of the flowers adapted to the bird's particular needs, and physical a example, red is the most I attractive colour to birds, and thus flowers which depend on birds for pollination are more often red, and lorikeets' to gues have bristles which help them to collect as much pollen as possible.

G Today, most of Australia's parrots inhabit woodland and open forest, and their numbers decline towards both deserts and wetter areas. The majority are nomadic to some degree, moving around to take advantage of feeding and breeding places. Two of the dry country parrots, the pink and grey galah and the pink, white and yellow corella have expanded their ranges in recent years. They are among the species that have adapted well to the changes brought about by European settlement forest telling created grasslands where galahs and corellas thrive.

H But other parrot species did not fare so well when their environments were altered. The clearing of large areas of rainforest is probably responsible for the disappearance of the double-eyed fig parrot, and numbers of ground parrots declined when a great part of their habitat was destroyed by the draining of coastal swamps. Even some parrot species that benefited from forest clearing at first are now comforted by a shortage of nesting sites due to further man-made changes.

I New conditions also sometimes favour an incoming species over one that originally inhabited the area. For example, after farmers cleared large areas of forest on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia, the island was colonised by galahs. They were soon going down holes and destroying black cockatoo eggs in order to take the hole for their own use. Their success precipitated a partial collapse in the black cockatoo population when the later lost the struggle for scarce nesting hollows.

J There may be no final answer to ensuring an equitable balance between parrot species. Nest box programmers help ease the shortage of nesting sites in some places, but there are not enough, they are expensive and they are not an adequate substitute by large, old trees, such as the habitat they represent and nectar, pollen and seeds they provide. Competition between parrots for nest sites is a result of the changes we humans have made to the Earth. We are the most widespread and dangerous competitors that parrots have ever had to face, but we also have the knowledge and skill to maintain the wonderfully rich diversity of Australia's parrots. All we need is the wild to do so.

A The law influences all of us virtually all the time, it governs almost all aspects of our behavior, and even what happens to us when we are no longer alive. It affects us from the embryo onwards. It governs the air we breathe, the food and drink we consume, our travel, family relationships, and our property. It applies at the bottom of the ocean and in space.

Each time we examine a label on a food product, engage in work as an employee or employer, travel on the roads, go to school to learn or to teach, stay in a hotel, borrow a library book, create or dissolve a commercial company, play sports, or engage the services of someone for anything from plumbing a sink to planning a city, we are in the world of law.

B Law has also become much more widely recognised as the standard by which behavior needs to be judged. A very telling development in recent history is the way in which the idea of law has permeated all parts of social life. The universal standard of whether something is socially tolerated is progressively becoming whether it is legal, rather than something that has always been considered acceptable. In earlier times, most people were illiterate. Today, by contrast, a vast number of people can read, and it is becoming easier for people to take an interest in law, and for the general population to help actually shape the law in many countries. However, law is a versatile instrument that can be used equally well for the improvement or the degradation of humanity.

C This, of course, puts law in a very significant position. In our rapidly developing world, all sorts of skills and knowledge are valuable. Those people, for example, with knowledge of computers, the internet, and communications technology are relied upon by the rest of us. There is now someone with IT skills or an IT help desk in every UK school, every company, every hospital, every local and central government office. Without their knowledge, many parts of commercial and social life today would seize up in minutes. But legal understanding is just as vital and as universally needed. The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it like this, 'We are all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem, the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.' In other words, the lawyer is the only person who has read and made sense of the rules.

D The number of laws has never been greater. In the UK alone, about 35 new Acts of Parliament are produced every year, thereby delivering thousands of new rules. The legislative output of the British Parliament has more than doubled in recent times from 1,100 pages a year in the early 1970s,to over 2,500 pages a year today. Between 1997 and 2006,the legislature passed 365 Acts of Parliament and more than 32,000 legally binding statutory instruments. In a system with so much law, lawyers do a great deal not just to vindicate the rights of citizens and organizations but also to help develop the law through legal arguments, some of which are adapted by judges to become laws. Law courts can and do produce new law and revise old law, but they do so having heard the arguments of lawyers.

E However, despite their important role in developing the rules, lawyers are not universally admired. Anti-lawyer jokes have a long history going back to the ancient Greeks. More recently the son of a famous Hollywood actor was asked at his junior school what his father did for a living, to which he replied,'My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the lawyer. For balance, though, it Is worth remembering that there are and have been many heroic and revered lawyers such as the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero and Mahatma Gandi, the Indian campaigner for independence.

F People sometimes make comments that characterise lawyers as professionals whose concerns put personal reward over truth, or who gain financially from misfortune. There are undoubtedly lawyers who fit that bill, just as there are some scientists, journalists, and others in similar categories. But, in general, it is no more fair to say that lawyers are bad because they make a living from people's problems than it is to make the same accusation against nurses or IT consultants. A great many lawyers are involved in public law work, such as that involving civil liberties, housing, and other issues. Such work is not lavishly remunerated, and the quality of service provided by these lawyers relies on considerable professional dedication. Moreover, much legal work has nothing to do with conflict or misfortune but is primarily concerned with drafting documents. Another source of social disaffection for lawyers, and disaffection for the law, is the public's limited understanding of how the law works and how it could be changed. Greater clarity about these issues, maybe as a result of better public relations, would reduce many aspects of public dissatisfaction with the law.