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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LightningCrash" data-source="post: 2051502" data-attributes="member: 4278">so loyal to the PP/IW brand"Once people pick a brand, their reasons for sticking with it are largely automatic. Read Montague is the director of the *human-neuroimaging laboratory and *computational-psychiatry unit at Virginia Tech’s Carilion Research Institute, where he studies how people choose and value products using an fMRI machine. When shoppers are exposed to a brand they identify with, their ventral medial prefrontal cortex lights up-the same part of the brain associated with reward recognition in drug users. That neural pathway may have helped our ancestors remember, say, which plants were safe to eat or when a tribal marking meant a clan was worth avoiding. In the modern age, we use the same circuitry as a shortcut for more mundane decisions. “As long as it keeps paying you back the same way,” Montague says, you buy the same brands. The feedback loop flashes: “It’s worth the money.”"</blockquote>