Neuroscience in Advertising; When Does it Become Mind Control?
By now you’re probably used to how predictive advertising has become, but it probably felt intrusive at first. Advertisers have always used subtle tactics to convince you to buy things, but now the privacy boundary is increasingly blurred. While it’s somewhat known that advertising finds its roots in propaganda, are developments in technology and neuroscience changing the fundamental nature of marketing into something that borders on mind control or manipulation?
The foundational elements of public relations and advertising were developed by a man named Edward L. Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of none other than Sigmund Freud. Freud gave a copy of his General Introductory Lectures, his seminal work on psychoanalysis, to Bernays as a gift in the nascent phase of his career.
Bernays was intrigued by Freud’s research, notably the idea that irrational forces drive human behavior. He took the idea and parlayed it into what he referred to as “engineering consent,” a concept that instead of bowing to consumer demands, cultivated them.
Bernays was first hired for a Lucky Strike campaign in which he created social trends to convince more people, particularly women, to smoke. He realized cigarettes exemplified male power, so he staged a campaign to empower women to smoke cigarettes by inviting a group of young female Vogue employees to light up on New York’s 5th avenue in a show of protest.
He referred to the campaign and the cigarettes involved as “Torches of Freedom.” Later, when the ladies expressed distaste for the green color of the packaging, he staged a number of events to make the color green fashionable.
This type of consent engineering was manipulative. And there’s evidence that Bernays likely knew of the dangers of smoking in those days as he would destroy his wife’s cigarettes whenever he found them at home. Despite this knowledge, and later becoming a public opponent of tobacco, he pitched Lucky Strikes as having a slimming effect and claimed they were soothing on the throat. He even wrote a book on his tactics blatantly titled, Propaganda, that would later inspire the Nazis.
Bernays used fear tactics, false or deceptive advertising, and what can only be referred to as social mind control tactics to sell products, even if they were dangerous or disingenuous.
This set the framework for the modern tactics that continue to perpetuate this trend, and while false or misleading advertising is pretty well-regulated by the FTC, the idea of engineering consent still persists. So is it possible consent may be engineered against our own will?
Mind Control Techniques Through Neuroscience
Today, neuroscientists are at the forefront of developing incredibly exciting technology, with the potential to correct for certain cognitive disorders and diseases. Some are undertaking the daunting task of mapping out the brain and its endless neural pathways, while others focus on the more incremental steps that may one day lead there, such as interfaces for telepathically controlling our mobile devices.
Often, this technology parallels the development of artificial intelligence, with programmers attempting to reverse engineer the brain or mirror the layout of neural networks in computer systems. This type of network control is being compared laterally to brain function, with the idea that if you inject energy into one part of a digital network, it should influence another.
Scientists applied this with a technique called deep brain stimulation, or DBS, used to treat those suffering from Parkinson’s and obsessive compulsive disorder. They found unusual activity in the fronto-striatal circuit to be responsible for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can be normalized with DBS. However, this type of energy injection can cascade across the brain, causing unintended effects.
Technology’s Creeping Mind Control
Mind control could be defined in a few ways, but the common conception requires the alteration of a person’s behavior in an observable manner, without that person’s permission. And typically, that lack of consent is known or desired by the one administering a mind-controlling function.
Not too long ago, researchers conducted a study measuring the effects electromagnetic radiation emitted from cell phones had on the brain. The study was predicated on the question of whether or not it was possible to control somebody’s mind with a cell phone.
Now, the definition of mind control, in this case, wasn’t as nefarious as the image that comes to mind when we think of dystopian sci-fi movies or Manchurian candidates but was instead much simpler. Can electromagnetic radiation from cell phones have an effect on mental behavior when transmitted at the proper frequency?
Their result turned out to be affirmative. The cell phone radiation stimulated alpha waves in the brain, particularly in areas closest to where the phone was being held. These types of waves are produced when we sleep, in wakeful states where we’re daydreaming, or when switching from external thinking to internal thinking. It’s even more unsettling when you find out that the study was conducted using, a now very obsolete, Nokia 6110.
Today, advertising is eerily predictive in our online browsing, but the majority of it is simply based on your search history. If you’ve searched for a product on the internet, you’ll probably be served an advertisement for that product or something similar, almost instantly. This can be avoided to a certain extent by clearing the cookies in your browser, going incognito, or using a Tor browser.
But questions have arisen recently as to whether advertisers take it too far by actively recording your conversations without your permission, so as to pick up on what to market to you. As technology becomes more intrinsically connected in our lives, what might be the next furtive marketing tactic or medium in advertising?
Interfaces able to read brain waves have been in development for a while and are getting closer to market launch. While advertising is already heavily reliant on cultivating or playing on consumers’ emotions, what if those emotions could be sensed physically through devices that constantly measure our biometrics. Might this already be happening?
About the Author
After WWII, Nazi Party Scientists Were Given a New Life in the US
The end of WWII was exciting for the Allies and their efforts to defeat the Nazis, but the spillover into the Cold War led to some paranoid moves by the CIA and U.S. government that was ethically questionable and sometimes downright detestable. One example of this, in particular, was the pardoning of hundreds of high-ranking Nazi scientists for the exploitation of their knowledge; and it wasn’t just pardoning, but providing cushy jobs with not-so-modest salaries and a high standard of living.
Many of these scientists were quietly assimilated into American society, and some have even been commemorated with plaques, statues, and busts, in celebration of their contributions to science. The name of this project was Operation Paperclip, due to the CIA’s use of paperclips to indicate the most nefarious and malevolent Nazis when one would look through a dossier of their profiles. On one hand, their achievements led to NASA’s Apollo missions and the moon landing – on the other, some “achievements” led to the creation of our chemical weapons program and more notorious, clandestine operations like MKULTRA.
The impetus behind Operation Paperclip was to prevent advanced Nazi weapon technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union. The program, which brought in roughly 1600 scientists, was originally titled, Operation Overcast before the CIA realized it needed to gloss over the notoriously paperclipped Nazis. Many of these scientists were known to have committed horrendous war crimes, like experimenting on live humans with chemical and biological weapons, but few were prosecuted.
Mittelwork and the V2 RocketÂ
Toward the end of the war, when the Nazis were nearing defeat, they developed the V-2 rocket under the guidance of Wernher von Braun and Arthur L Rudolph. Both of these scientists eventually went on to develop the Saturn V rocket that was so critical to the success of the Apollo missions and bringing together mankind in the subsequent moon landings.
But the story was much different at the Mittelwork facility in Germany, where slave labor was used to develop the V-2, resulting in the death of roughly 20,000 people, and that doesn’t even include deaths from the use of the bomb itself.
