This was a nice and easy nonfiction read, seeming almost like a vacation after the intellectual beating offered by the likes of Steven Pinker and R. Douglas Fields. But that's faint praise, as this book excelled in ambition and authorial back-patting, but was pretty short on big ideas. The crux of the book is the emergence of neuromarketing, which involves using fMRI and other brain-scanning techniques as a means of truly understanding consumers' loves and hates, rather than just asking the consumers to their faces. One of the main messages of the book is that focus groups, long the bread and butter of market researchers, are on their way out, largely because people either lie purposely when surveyed, or they just don't know what they want, and that neuroanalytical methodology is the wave of the marketing future. If this sounds scary, well, it kind of is, and Lindstrom is careful (perhaps too careful) to calm his readers' fears of dystopian manipulation, mainly because he himself is a big force in pushing these brain-scanning techniques forward.

Despite these somewhat pointed criticisms, the book does offer a handful of truly remarkable findings. My favorite among them? That smokers, when shown those disgusting anti-smoking images (man smoking through hole in throat, woman with teeth rotted out), actually experience activation in the nucleus accumbens, which is one of the brain's primary craving centers---yes, the exact warnings meant to dissuade smoking make smokers want to light up. And we never would have found that out in a focus group, right?