Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands33—Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Ford—put up $7 million to fund a study into the neuroscience of buying behavior. They wanted to know if there were more effective ways to sell their products and joined forces to underwrite the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted—an attempt to replace misleading focus groups with straight-ahead brain scans. Marketing researcher and consultant Martin Lindstrom teamed up with British neuroscientist Gemma Calvert for the project. Over the course of three years, they used both fMRI and EEG to scan the brains of more than two thousand people as they made a variety of buying decisions. The researchers discovered that product placement34 in TV shows and movies rarely works, that warning labels of cigarettes actually prime the urge to smoke more, and that—most surprisingly—shopping and spirituality seem to rely on similar neuronal circuitry. When deeply religious subjects view sacred