We will now look at another instance where the brain influences what we sense.When he isn’t pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In a series of TV commercials in the US from the 1970s and 1980s that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn’t taste any better?
Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an MRI machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward (monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task). Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.
In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So, Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke’s image, its ‘brand influence,’ by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke.
What’s more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the pre-frontal cortex; an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink—in a word, its brand—to shape their preference.
Pepsi, crucially, couldn’t achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred it. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of scientific precision, the special power of Coke’s brand to override our taste buds.
The frontal cortex region of the brain is commonly as-sociated with our sense of self. Patients with damage in this area of the brain often undergo drastic changes in personality; in one famous case, a mild-mannered 19th-century rail worker named Phineas Gage abruptly became belligerent after an accident that destroyed his medial pre-frontal cortex.
More recently, MRI studies have found increased activity in this region when people are asked if adjectives like ‘trustworthy or ‘courageous’ apply to them. When the pre-frontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner, with what sort of a person you are. For the readers interested in religion and metaphysics, the cortex is the nearest anatomical equivalent of a ‘super ego’.
Alert readers may remember our discussion about repressive personalities in chapter 7 and on the role played by the frontal cortex in the brains of repressives. I give this interesting aside on the power of brands to bring home the point about the way in which our perceptions of things can influence our actions and our senses. One point is in order here—many scientists are sceptical of the use of neurology in marketing. The brain, they point out, is still an enigma; just because we can see neurons firing doesn’t mean we always know what the mind is doing.