Portalesque Pastorale

"No One Could Have Predicted..."

The Pepsi Paradox

I listened to an "All in the Mind" radio program this week on how modern neuroscience views the unconscious. What I got out of the program was that much of what is traditionally attributed to the unconscious is actually preprocessing of your raw perceptions. The guest on the program explains that if you saw a raw video feed of what comes out of your eyeballs, it would look very poor quality, have a black hole in the middle, and would be upside down. Your visual cortex is doing a tremendous amount of processing. Other cognitive tasks, like social intuition, also involve a lot of manipulation of raw experience before we deal with them consciously.

The Pepsi Paradox refers to the fact that people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests much more than soft drink sales would suggest. This paradox launched the field of neuro-marketing.

[Link] to the "All in the Mind" program.
[Link] to a short Frontline article about neuro-marketing.
[Link] to a Negativland song about the Pepsi paradox.