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addicts to Olympians. So what? Motivate consumers to try or to continue using your brand or product by activating their pleasure/reward circuits by focusing on powerful images of the emotional “payoff ” elements of your product: the luscious depiction of the chocolate, or the smooth leather seats of the high-performance automobile.
    Physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted, you fall into a deep, restora-tive sleep. And a new day dawns.
    Same Brain, Different Day
    This morning, you wake to the sound of an alarm buzzing. You are warm and comfortable. Instead of focusing on finding food to ensure your survival, you examine your refrigerator to see which option has the fewest calories.
    Rarely—if ever – is the search for sustenance your prime motivator for the day’s activities. But your ancient brain still feels compelled to hunt, to achieve, and so it elevates today’s missions into life-and-death scenarios as it has evolved to handle.
    Checking your e-mail, you see that a contract that should have been signed lingers in Legal. Exactly as you did when faced with hunger in the savannah, your anxiety rises, you become tense and hyperalert. Your brain urges you to seek relief.
    You grab your cell phone and laptop and begin your commute. Sitting in traffic, your brain feels hunted. Horns blast and your amygdala fires (the part of your brain that responds immediately to stress), your blood pressure rises, and your breath becomes shallow and fast. Messages assault and seduce you without relief. The radio plays. The stock market is down. Your sense of security is shaken again. Irritation grows as other cars attempt to squeeze into your space.
    You masterfully outmaneuver and do not allow others to outpace you.
    Arriving at work, you gather your electronic spears, and walk from the parking deck. Along the way, a group of young men appears, sweating and shaking, demanding money and all of your electronics. Your defensive instincts swing into action. You yell and try to move around the men. Confronted, they are now angry rather than just desperate. Now they want your life, not just your laptop. Your heart pounds and your muscles tremble. Just at that moment, a security guard rounds the corner, and the men flee.
    You collapse in relief. But hours, days, and weeks later, your brain replays the event. You dream about it in symbols every night. Your fear is heightened and your safety is threatened. And unlike your earlier self, you do not run or

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    Your Customer’s Brain Is 100,000 Years Old
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    fight or walk off the anxiety. Instead, you enter your office and sit. You interact with your colleagues all day, in well-spoken struggles for influence and power.
    As your cortisol level rises, this “stress hormone” improves your alertness and performance.
    You are “on your game,” aligning yourself with those who support your goals, scanning for motives of those who might undermine it, eyes on the prize all day long, 100 percent of the time.
    When you emerge, night has fallen and blinking signs surround you. Your brain fights to make sense of the many messages hurtling toward it (see Figure 3.2).
    Figure 3.2
    Times Square. Your brain constantly struggles to make sense of a flood of messages and images.
    Source: Photo by Bart Penfold

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    The Buying Brain
    Many are cast aside, irrelevant. Some of the more relevant or novel messages reverberate in your hippocampus to be stored more permanently in your cortex and throughout your brain.
    When the brain is exposed to too many messages, or interrupted in its drive to complete a task, it purposefully drives distracting messages or images into the background so that it can focus on the task at hand. The brain can ill afford to attend to each note of the cacophonous