One of my favourite TED talks is by Jill Bolte Taylor.
She is neuroanatomist, a specialised form of brain researcher.
One morning she woke up with a splitting headache.
At first she ignored it.
What she didn’t know was that a blood vessel had just exploded in her brain.
And every second she ignored it, it grew.
But she thought it was just a bad headache.
And, as the pain got worse, she began to find parts of her body shutting down.
Suddenly her right arm stopped working completely.
She finally realised what was happening.
“Oh my God, I’m having a stroke.”
But it was her next thought that separates her off as a truly unusual human being.
She thought “What an opportunity. How many brain scientists get to study what actually happens during a stroke, from the inside?”
And that’s exactly what she did.
She made mental notes of the whole experience as it was unfolding.
Meanwhile, the doctors sawed a large part of her skull away and removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball.
It took her eight years to recover.
During which time she memorised, catalogued, and formulated theories based on her experience.
She is now the national spokesperson for The Harvard Brain Tissue Research Centre, and Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 must influential people in the world.
We could all do the equivalent of what Jill Bolte Taylor did.
We don’t even have to wait until we have a stroke to observe what happens in our job.
We work in advertising.
We work in mass communication to ordinary people.
We could choose to experience what that feels like, how it really works, anytime we want.
We could go back to being ordinary people, because we are ordinary people.
When we leave work and go into a supermarket to buy something, we aren’t marketing experts.
We’re people shopping.
We could watch ourselves from the inside.
And when we experience ourselves like ordinary people we can see how little most advertising affects our choices.
We can see how irrelevant and silly all the subtleties and details we argue about are.
But we don’t do that.
We observe ordinary people through a microscope.
As if we are scientists and they are bacteria.
We have research groups and planners to tell us how ordinary people behave, and what they think.
We have marketing people to tell us the nuances of the meanings.
We have creatives to tell us which executions will win awards and be seen as creative breakthroughs.
And all of that is an illusion.
Try an experiment.
Be an ordinary person for just a minute.
We are told everyone is exposed to 1,000 advertising messages a day.
Quick, name ten you remember from yesterday.
(Because ten would be 1% unprompted recall.)
Can’t do ten, okay name one.
(One would be 0.01% unprompted recall.)
The difficulty in remembering even a single ad from yesterday gives you an insight into the real problem.
When we are ordinary people it’s blindingly obvious.
But when we revert to being advertising experts it somehow isn’t.
So that’s the real problem.
The problem is we don’t behave like ordinary people.
So we never see the problem.

We turned off our brains when we became advertising experts.