Just as early mariners were clueless about the Coriolis forces that drove the trade winds, so have advertisers honed their craft without understanding the neural underpinnings of the desires and perceptions on which they seek to capitalize. And just as understanding the physics of trade winds had little practical effect on maritime navigation, so, too, will the march of cognitive science be unlikely to spin off a scientific field of neuroadvertising.

"For about 50 years there have been people who looked at physiological or neurological responses to marketing stimuli," says David Stewart, a marketing expert at the University of Southern California. "[But] they have not had much real impact on the way advertising is created or assessed. The reality is that it's almost always easier to just directly ask people what they liked about an ad," or follow their behavior afterward to gauge its effectiveness.

From this point of view, neuroscience will probably not soon be adding any tools to the marketing industry's bag of tricks. But as these examples show, it will at least help explain how the current tools work. Indeed, as cognitive science emerges from its own Bronze Age, it is holding up the hope (or for some onlookers, the horror) of a new set of concepts for charting the lay of human nature.

How deep these new ideas will penetrate into civic policy and individual self-conception (as, for example, the psychoanalytic revolution did a century ago) will be interesting to watch. It will be interesting to see, for instance, whether the activist-planned lawsuits to hold the fast-food industry accountable for supersizing America's collective waistline (and medical bill) will prevail. While neuroscience provides a plausible foundation for the case that the industry's marketing practices will inevitably net consumers en masse into excess consumption, society may never be ready to let individuals off the hook for taking the bait. Or, as it did in the suits against Big Tobacco -- where the science of addiction was a central issue -- it might.

Each side in the debate should prepare to be surprised over the next few decades. The lines between manipulation, free choice and manufactured vs. true desire could turn out to lie quite differently from how they feel.

Meanwhile, other areas of marketing and consumerism will come into better focus as well. Scientists who study music and memory will figure out why melodies and jingles lodge so firmly in the mind's ear. Researchers who study social cognition will continue to zero in on the circuitry that drives us, broadly speaking, to keep up with the Joneses. And psychologists who study people's sense of happiness may some day be able to approach directly the central, yet seldom stated, question of consumer capitalism: Do we really increase our long-term happiness by buying as voraciously as we do? Or does that sense, like many other aspects of our intuitive self-knowledge, turn out to be steeped in illusion?

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