What lies behind most of our decisions?
The brain’s ability to evaluate the stimuli it receives is called cognitive processing and is divided into two types that coexist and act simultaneously in our day-to-day behaviour.
The explicit system holds all the knowledge we are aware of. We know that we know.
However, the implicit system holds the knowledge we are not aware of, and the information which forms part of our resources or behavioural skills. In other words, we know even though we don’t realise we know.
This implicit system governs most of our decisions and is often confused with intuition. Some of the most widely studied are priming or perceptive facilitation, procedural memory and classical conditioning.
When we purchase a product, we often have the explicit feeling that we are making a conscious decision. But that is not actually the case.
What actually happens when we see a product is that the cognitive resources of implicit processing, which contain information about emotions, semantic attributes, aesthetic valuation of the product’s packaging and feelings about the price we must pay, become active.
These implicit reactions are unconscious, and are made unwittingly without us even realising.
Thanks to neuroimaging techniques, we can reveal the neurophysiological profiles of this implicit processing, and therefore describe specific patterns related to triggering cognitive reactions that the person involved would otherwise be unable to explain in a focus group.
Functional connectivity profiles and, therefore, those of the functional circuits and networks subject to this implicit processing, are the only profiles that can give us access to implicit processing and allow us to dive deep into the human cognitive system, which had never previously been accessed from an empirical perspective.
The high temporal resolution of magnetoencephalograpy, means we can consider the implicit reactions that take place in the first milliseconds of processing. The first unconscious emotional reactions associated with a specific product will therefore be revealed within 300 ms of processing.
Only by using this methodology is it possible to evaluate the functional networks associated with these fast implicit reactions that govern most of our decisions.
The moment of truth has arrived.
