Matt Johnson

“At the most basic level, marketing tweaks the consumer’s experience of one sense through use of others—restaurants curating not only our meal, but the music, the decor, and more. At a deeper level, it alters the consumer’s beliefs about what’s being consumed—dog food only tastes palatable when you believe it may be pâté. And finally, in the most extreme cases, it ingrains these perception-altering beliefs so deeply that a brand literally etches itself into the architecture of our brains.”
― Matt Johnson, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

“What is the meaning of life?” No pressure, Alan! His reply did not disappoint: You have to try and find out what you want, and so I went into that very thoroughly, what do I want to happen? And of course as soon as you ask yourself that you begin to fantasize, and our amazing technology is of course an expression of human desire, desire for power, for what we want to achieve. So I simply set myself to thinking through how far we could go. And so I soon found myself at a great push-button place, where I had a fantastic mechanism with buttons available for every conceivable thing I could wish. So I spent quite a bit of time playing with those . . . you press one button and here’s Cleopatra . . . and press this button and symphonic music, in sixteen-channel sound . . . all possible pleasures are available . . . You suddenly notice there’s a button labeled “Surprise.” You push that, and here we are.”
― Matt Johnson, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains