Since then, the behaviorists’ black box has been penetrated by neuroscientists, most recently by Read Montague of the Baylor College of Medicine with Why Choose This Book? (Dutton, 2006). Montague argues that our brains evolved computational programs to evaluate choices in terms of their value and efficiency: “Those that accurately estimate the costs and the long-term benefits of choices will be more efficient than those that don’t.”
Life, like the economy, is about the allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses (to paraphrase economist Thomas Sowell). It all boils down to energy efficiency. To a predator, Montague says, prey are batteries of energy: “This doctrine mandates that evolution discover efficient computational systems that know how to capture, process, store, and reuse energy efficiently.” Those that do so pass on their genetic programs for efficient computational neural processing to make efficient choices. As a result, our brains consume only about one-fifth the energy of a lightbulb.
Unfortunately, these evolved computational programs can be hijacked. Addictive drugs, for example, rewire the brain’s dopamine system–normally used to reward choices that are good for the organism, such as obtaining food, family and friends–to reward choosing the next high instead. Ideas do something similar, in that they take over the role of reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons. This effect includes bad ideas, such as the Heaven’s Gate cult members who chose suicide to join the mother ship they believed was awaiting them near Comet Hale-Bopp. The brains of suicide bombers have been similarly commandeered by bad ideas from their religions or politics.
Our brains evolved computational programs to evaluate choices in terms of their value and efficiency.
How can we utilize this theory of choice to our advantage? Montague employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to discover that certain brands, such as Coke, “change dopamine delivery to various brain regions through their effect on reward prediction circuitry.” The Coke brand has a “flavor” in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region essential for decision making. Just as Coke is a proxy for flavor, hunger a proxy for caloric need, lust a proxy for reproductive necessity, and guilt and joy proxies for immoral and moral behavior, so, too, can we market moral brands to rewire brains to value and choose good ideas.
In honor of the late economist Milton Friedman, author of the radical book Free to Choose, I propose that we begin by marketing this brand–the Principle of Freedom: all people are free to think, believe and act as they choose, as long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.
