The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind by A. K. Pradeep Page B

offspring already trained in the healing power of touch. Not coincidentally, sex is the number one touch pleasure. And what a grand design that our species’ goal is also our greatest pleasure!
    Our need for touch soothing is so profound in humans, in fact, that touch-deprived infants often suffer some degree of brain damage. During even short separation of infant and mother, “changes occurred in heart rate, body temperature, brainwave patterns, sleep patterns, and immune system function,” according to Diane Ackerman. When they’re reunited with the mother, all psychological changes resolve almost immediately. But, physical distresses, susceptibility to disease, persist. “This experiment,” says Ackerman,
    “concluded that lack of maternal contact may lead to long-term, systemic damage.”
    Our Largest Sensory Organ
    Our skin is the barrier between us and everything else. It gives us our shape, protects us from invaders, cools or heats us, produces vitamin D, holds our body fluids, and mends itself quickly and constantly. At 6–10 pounds, our skin is the largest organ in our bodies. It is without doubt the key organ of sexual attraction. By combining eyesight and touch, primates like us excel at locating objects in space. Touch is, in many ways, the embodiment of sight.
    Our fingertips and tongues are much more sensitive than are our backs.
    Some parts of the body are ticklish, while others itch, shiver, or get “goose-flesh.” The hairiest parts of our body are the most sensitive to pressure, because there are many sense receptors at the base of each hair. The skin is thinnest where we have hair, too.
    From mice to lions to humans, the whiskers around the mouth are exquisitely sensitive.
    Different parts of the body vary in their sensitivity to tactile and painful stimuli according to the number and distribution of receptors. Our lips excel at touch discrimination, for example, and our forearms do not.
    Pain produces the most urgent response. That’s why many of our touch sensors are devoted to discovering and avoiding pain, key to our survival as a human, and by extension, as a species.

    P1: OTA/XYZ
    P2: ABC
    c05
    JWBT296-Pradeep
    June 7, 2010
    6:38
    Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA
    The Five Senses and the Buying Brain
    53
    Touch in the Marketplace
    The most sensitive areas of your body are your hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips, and feet. So what? Products that touch those areas should be sensual, pleasant, soothing, and inviting.
    As we discussed in the earlier portions of this chapter, your body has sensory receptors all over it, but they’re distributed unevenly. Your tongue, for example, is covered with taste buds, but your back has relatively few sensory receptors. Your fingers can brush a jacket and know instantly what material it’s made of, what shape the buttons are, even how warm it might be. Your buttocks on the other hand, provide gruff information on the hardness of the chair they sit on and that’s about it. That’s why your finger maps take up 100 times as much space in your cortex as does the map of your trunk.
    Consider the sensory capabilities of the product or experience you’re selling to the Buying Brain. If your experience is to be tactile, then infuse it with great fun for the fingers, great areas of exploration for the lips!
    In this chapter, we explored each of the body’s five senses to learn how best to use them to invite the Buying Brain in. We learned that: r Vision is chief among our senses, and that our Buying Brains will discount information that is not in concert with the visual stimuli it receives.
    r Our sense of smell is the most direct route to our emotions and memory storage. Being linked with a pleasant, iconic smell can significantly improve a product’s success in the marketplace.
    r What we hear is specialized and tuned to what interests us. The Buying Brain will easily ignore distracting or disturbing noises (along with any messages that