Ecopsychology

Ecopsychology takes a whack at helping us understand how we got into this mess and how to break loose and work toward getting out of it. This blog post collects and summarizes some of the ... I guess it's ok to use this word now ... science. Very creepy how our brains have been hijacked to make a few rich people richer! Here's an excerpt:

But How Could This Happen? Surely We Know What We Want

We do, but not if we're convinced otherwise. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest how such hijacking of human desires occurs. The neural systems of the human brain that detect and evaluate social reward circuits are located in the mid-region of our brain where they generally operate outside of our conscious awareness. So, as reporter Sandra Blakeslee concludes in her review of this research in the New York Times, February, 19, 2002, “In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.”

...snip...

By using magnetic imagining scanners, California Institute of Technology neuroscientists Steve Quartz and Annette Asp are observing the effects of advertising on the human brain. Their findings further explain how we end up not knowing what we need, much less knowing how to fulfill our needs. It seems that networks of neurons in our brain act in concert in response to experience. So, just as practicing the piano or learning to read physically alters areas of the cerebral cortex, intense, repetitive marketing can do more than change our minds. It may alter the brain itself.[1] We are not only what we eat, but also what we hear, see, and otherwise experience most often.

Armed with this information marketers have become ever more sophisticated at -- to use their term – "branding our brains" with what’s called neuro-marketing techniques.