In a previous post in Self-Help category I was talking what self-help is and the fact that there are certain features in us we can not get rid of. The other thing is that we can manipulate them while while getting some of them to the day light and the rest keeping somewhere in the dark corners inside our heads. The way to get some of our qualities out is while choosing right stimulation. However, it is pretty interesting the way different stimulus can be decoded by our subconscious without us having a smallest clue.
Accidentally I stumbled into a very interesting research made by a marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, an author of the Buyology book. This man spend 3 years and 7 billion dollars on the research in order to figure out the way people react to different adds, brands and campaigns and what really sells. But i do believe that his research outcome can be easily adopted in self-help and various therapies. Lindstrom used the MRI machine worth 4 billion dollars. The interesting thing about MRI is that this machine can notice the hemoglobin, substance which moves oxygen along your system, movement in the body. Oxygen is one of the fuel our system uses while coping with different tasks. Therefore, while observing the level of hemoglobin in the brains while using MRI you can see which part of the brain reacts while coping with certain tasks (analyzing images, sounds, etc.) and how strong are different parts of the brain involved in the task. And to illustrate my idea of the ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ stimulus for the brains in order to bring out the right outcome I will analyze the example of one of the woman who was involved in Lindstrom research. Woman, called Marlene, a mother of two is a smoker. According to her she is not really addicted and it is more during occasions she actually lights up the cigarette rather than smokes daily and often. Lindstrom wanted to analyze how much social advertising aiming to encourage people not to smoke really works. He asked Marlene few questions before he started the experiment with MRI. According to Marlene she does smoke, but the warnings on the cigarette packages are effective and it makes her smoke less. In order to figure out the way Marlene’s brains really react to this kind of stimulus to quit smoking she was put under MRI. She has different warnings about smoking threats (like the ones on cigarette packages) passing in front of her eyes and while pressing different buttons she is asked how much different warning makes her to WANT to smoke.
Several weeks later the first results reveal that the warning text she saw did not even slightly discourage Marlene from smoking. And even are more interesting results arrive after analyzing MRI data which was collected during a research. Apparently the warning text, which aimed to discourage from smoking, actually was stimulating the part of the brains called nucleus accumbens which is a pleasure center in the brains. It is thought to play an important role in reward, pleasure, laughter, addiction, aggression, fear, and the placebo effect. This area in the brain gets activated than the body wants something: drugs, sex, alcohol, tobacco. So even Marlene said that text affects her, her subconscious kinda though the opposite.
Marlene’s example is of the way different stimulus can actually affect in the opposite way you want. This is very important to understand in self-help therapies and various other psychological activities. The stimulus which aim to bring the good things out of you and hide your bad habits must be chosen very carefully in order not to have the opposite result to the one you want.
