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cart. You’ve never tasted the stuff, but your gut tells you you’ve made the right decision. If I asked you to describe how you came to your decision, you’d probably shrug and reply “Instinct,” or “No reason,” or “I just did.” But the real rationale behind your choices was in fact built on a lifetime of associations—some positive, others negative—that you weren’t consciously aware of. Because when we make decisions about what to buy, our brain summons and scans incredible amounts of memories, facts, and emotions and squeezes them into a rapid response—a shortcut of sorts that allows you to travel from A to Z in a couple of seconds, and that dictates what you just put inside your shopping cart. A recent study conducted by German brand and retail experts, Gruppe Nymphenberg, found that over 50 percent of all purchasing decisions by shoppers are made spontaneously—and therefore unconsciously—at the point of sale.

These brain shortcuts have another name: a somatic marker.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHER Socrates once told his student Theaetetus to imagine the mind as a block of wax “on which we stamp what we perceive or conceive.” Whatever is impressed upon the wax, Socrates said, we remember and know, provided the image remains in the wax, but “whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know.”1 A metaphor so suggestive and widespread that we still say that an experience “made an impression.”

Imagine for a moment that you’re a six-year-old kid. You’re just home from school and you’re hungry, so you wander into the kitchen to see what that nice smell is that’s coming from the stove. Opening the oven door, you spy a navy-blue Le Creuset pot. You begin to pull out the pot when you recoil backward, your fingertips stinging. You’re in tears; your parents come running; and assuming your fingertips weren’t too badly burned, a half hour later you’re back playing with your trains, dinosaurs, or sharks.

The tenderness of your fingertips will vanish in a few days, but your mind isn’t quite so lenient. It won’t forgive what happened; certainly it won’t ever forget it. Subconsciously, the neurons in your brain have just assembled an equation of sorts, one linking together the concepts of “oven” and “hot” and “fingertips” and “grill” and “excruciating pain.” In sum, this chain-link of concepts and body parts and sensations creates what scientist Antonio Damasio calls a somatic marker—a kind of bookmark, or shortcut, in our brains. Sown by past experiences of reward and punishment, these markers serve to connect an experience or emotion with a specific, required reaction. By instantaneously helping us narrow down the possibilities available in a situation, they shepherd us toward a decision that we know will yield the best, least painful outcome. Long after we’ve passed our sixth year, we “know” whether or not it’s right to kiss a hostess we barely know good-bye after a cocktail party, whether it’s safe to dive into a lake, how we should approach that German shepherd, or that if we reach into an oven without a mitt on, our fingers will get burned. If someone asks us how or why we know that, most of us shrug—what a funny question—and chalk up our response to “instinct.”

These same cognitive shortcuts are what underlie most of our buying decisions. Remember: it took you less than ten seconds to choose the Jif and the Iskilde, based on a completely unconscious series of flags in your brain that led you straight to an emotional reaction. All of a sudden, you “just knew” which brand you wanted, but were completely unaware of the factors—the shape of the product’s container, childhood memories, its price, and a lot of other considerations—that led to your decision.

But somatic markers aren’t simply a collection of reflexes from childhood or adolescence. Every day, we manufacture new ones, adding them to the bulging collection already in place. And the bigger our brain’s collection of somatic markers, whether for shampoos, face creams, chewing gums, breath mints, potato chips, vodka bottles, shaving creams, deodorants, vitamins,