I paid twenty dollars for a quesadilla at ATX last August with a Johns Hopkins neuromarketing lecture playing on my laptop. The queso was lukewarm and lacked flavor. The chips weren’t great. The lecture was about the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes a brand feel like part of the self, so buying stops being a decision and starts being a shortcut. I had been in the city for ten weeks and was about to fly back to Boston.
The specialization is three courses. Neuroscience, research methods, neuromarketing techniques. The marketing copy for a related Hopkins course puts the premise more plainly than the specialization itself does. Once you understand how the brain evolved, you learn that thinking we are anything more than smart monkeys is hubris. The course offers to teach you how to reach the primitive and irrational parts of the brain that are actually in charge. It also promises to help you do this ethically.
The coursework is more measured than the pitch. You learn about attention, emotional arousal, memory encoding. You learn what an fMRI scan shows and what it doesn’t. You learn that human behavior, from the perspective of a marketing team, is variability in outcomes. Noise that good research can reduce. A few weeks ago I watched a documentary called Our Consumer Society. One of its older arguments is that production does not meet preexisting wants. It creates them alongside whatever it produces. The Hopkins specialization is the technical version of the same claim. The medial PFC comes up because it lights up when people process information about themselves. A brand that integrates into that circuit is no longer evaluated as a product. It is recognized as a feature of the person doing the evaluating. The decision moves upstream of the decider.
This is just the state of the art in terms of getting people to buy shit. What is new, or new to me, is that we have a technical vocabulary now for how wanting gets installed, and we teach it, and the certificate goes on a résumé. The science is interesting and mostly correct. It tells you where in the system the technique now lives. It lives at Hopkins.
Whatever the critique was supposed to do, it has not done it. The ideas are right there. They have been right there for a long time. The thing they describe continues, and in some ways describes itself better than the critiques do, because the current operating manual is more detailed than the history.
There is an older model of power in which authority works by saying no. Laws, prohibitions, punishments. There is a newer model in which power works by saying yes, efficiently. It keeps populations alive and productive. It keeps them wanting. It shapes where the wanting goes. Some directions are made easier, more familiar, more like recognition. The Hopkins course does not frame what it teaches this way. It frames it as influence, optimization, a better understanding of the customer. A population that has stopped wanting is difficult to govern. A population that is wanting something specific, at a predictable rate, through predictable channels, is not. The coursework does not have to say this. The dashboards say it.
I finished the specialization. The certificate is on my LinkedIn. The science is the science. The techniques work or they don’t, and mostly they work a little, which is enough. What I notice, having taken it, is that the position of someone who has taken it is not outside the position of someone who hasn’t. My medial PFC lit up when I added it to LinkedIn. The knowledge does not relocate you. It gives you a clearer view of the room you are already in.
The quesadilla was twenty dollars. The lecture was good. The flight was on time.