WEBVTT 00:00.230 --> 00:06.380 To highlight the extent of which buying decisions are made with emotion. 00:06.380 --> 00:14.450 I want to show you this article which talks about a patient of Anthony Damasio's who had a brain injury. 00:14.450 --> 00:22.400 And just to give you a little background, Anthony Damasio is one of the most famous of the modern neuroscientists. 00:22.490 --> 00:27.800 He's retired now, and a lot of his students are doing the cutting edge work in neuroscience. 00:27.800 --> 00:29.900 But he's one of the legends in this field. 00:29.900 --> 00:35.850 And so Tony Damasio had this patient, and that's what this article is about. 00:35.870 --> 00:43.010 You see, it's titled How only Being Able to Use logic to Make decisions destroyed a man's life. 00:43.160 --> 00:48.800 Because we think that most of our decisions are logical. 00:48.800 --> 00:51.680 And if they're not totally logical, they are mostly logical. 00:51.710 --> 00:55.340 That's the popular thing that people think. 00:55.340 --> 00:59.300 But this case is going to show you that it's incredibly false. 00:59.300 --> 01:08.550 And there are many extremely prominent philosophers, namely the Stoics, namely René Descartes, who 01:08.700 --> 01:14.850 looked at emotions as much more insignificant than they actually are. 01:14.880 --> 01:21.570 They were much more focused on pure logic, and their influence spilled over into our modern culture. 01:21.570 --> 01:24.480 But to a large degree, that's an error. 01:24.480 --> 01:33.090 And that's what we're going to examine here, which is the extent to which emotions drive our entire 01:33.090 --> 01:34.580 life and every decision. 01:34.590 --> 01:39.800 So I'm going to scroll down and I'm just going to read to you the important parts of this article. 01:39.810 --> 01:43.590 I'm going to have the link to this article in the resources of this video so you can read it on your 01:43.590 --> 01:46.890 own if you'd like, but I'll just read you the highlights. 01:47.460 --> 01:52.560 You see, Antonio Damasio had this patient he's referred to as Elliot. 01:52.590 --> 01:56.670 Elliot had a brain tumor before the brain tumor? 01:56.700 --> 02:00.140 Elliot had a good job at a business firm. 02:00.150 --> 02:02.880 He was the role model for his colleagues. 02:02.880 --> 02:04.470 And he was a dutiful husband. 02:04.500 --> 02:07.780 He had a family, so his life was just fine. 02:07.800 --> 02:15.870 But when he had his tumor removed, one of the effects of the surgery was that the logical and the emotional 02:15.870 --> 02:21.300 parts of the brain were cut off and he was no longer able to use emotion. 02:21.450 --> 02:25.080 But you see, after the surgery, his life fell apart. 02:25.080 --> 02:31.650 And he project he did at his job were left incomplete or needed to be corrected, eventually leading 02:31.680 --> 02:33.240 to him losing the job. 02:33.270 --> 02:38.250 He also couldn't tell if some people were trying to take advantage of him like some shady characters. 02:38.310 --> 02:45.060 He got divorced, married again to a wrong person, divorced again, and had to move in with his brother. 02:45.150 --> 02:48.870 But he was still cognitively able. 02:48.900 --> 02:52.170 He was able to do math, logic, things like that. 02:52.290 --> 02:56.370 You see, it says here his cognitive faculties were ace. 02:56.400 --> 03:00.850 He tested well in an IQ test and other measures of intelligence. 03:00.900 --> 03:06.810 The long term, short term memory, language, skills, perception, all these were still present. 03:06.840 --> 03:10.860 He was not stupid, but he just couldn't do regular everyday things. 03:10.860 --> 03:17.040 For example, he would spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out how to categorize his documents. 03:17.040 --> 03:23.040 Should it be by date or by case he's working on or the size of the document? 03:23.280 --> 03:25.320 He couldn't make decisions. 03:25.710 --> 03:30.510 And I'll fast forward in the article for you to this interesting takeaway for us. 03:30.540 --> 03:37.620 You see, it says this led Damasio to formulate what might be his greatest contribution to the understanding 03:37.620 --> 03:39.480 of the brain and the human body. 03:39.750 --> 03:41.400 And this takes a while to understand. 03:41.400 --> 03:42.840 So let's go through it slowly. 03:42.870 --> 03:43.560 Here it is. 03:43.590 --> 03:51.180 When you're thinking about a course of action, you imagine your body to be in the potential situation 03:51.390 --> 03:55.070 and you get a good or bad feeling about that. 03:55.080 --> 04:02.040 Since we're talking about sales here, think about your buyer when they come across your product and 04:02.040 --> 04:07.770 they think to themselves, If I buy this in the future, will I be in a better or worse situation, 04:07.770 --> 04:09.480 that that same process. 04:09.480 --> 04:12.750 And so if you keep reading, it's not that right. 04:12.750 --> 04:14.970 Decisions come from that sort of feeling alone. 04:14.970 --> 04:23.820 But Damasio argues those somatic markers, the good feeling or bad feeling, filter away lots of alternatives. 04:24.060 --> 04:26.940 They're a shortcut to decision making. 04:27.060 --> 04:33.000 So you see that feeling we get that's emotional. 04:33.090 --> 04:35.160 You can call it a gut reaction. 04:35.160 --> 04:37.040 You can call it something else. 04:37.050 --> 04:42.690 But logic only begins to work after you have that feeling. 04:42.690 --> 04:49.230 And many people think that, well, logic will rescue everything and you'll find the logical conclusion. 04:49.230 --> 04:57.120 But you see, your logic is going to operate on the values that you deem good or bad. 04:57.120 --> 04:58.690 Ethical, unethical or. 04:58.750 --> 05:02.980 Moral immoral that you decided on previously. 05:03.280 --> 05:10.270 Through your emotions, a lot of your internal biases were emotionally set. 05:10.270 --> 05:19.570 So your logic will only kind of course correct you towards other goals or values that in the past you 05:19.570 --> 05:22.990 emotionally decided were advantageous for you. 05:23.020 --> 05:29.680 It's almost like you're in the matrix of your own emotions and it's very hard to be purely logical. 05:29.830 --> 05:39.730 And I want to make one more profound point that many people concede that, okay, sure, maybe in small 05:39.730 --> 05:45.340 purchases, like if I see a piece of chocolate in a store and I'll have a gut reaction and think to 05:45.340 --> 05:51.010 myself, I want it and it will be an impulse buy, okay, I'll spend a couple of dollars, I'll buy 05:51.010 --> 05:51.750 the chocolate. 05:51.760 --> 05:52.450 Fine. 05:52.450 --> 05:53.350 It's no big deal. 05:53.350 --> 05:55.480 Impulse buy in the in the moment. 05:55.600 --> 06:00.440 But this is not at all what I'm after in this video. 06:00.470 --> 06:06.110 What I really want to show you in this video, and it's all highlighted by this case study of Elliott. 06:06.140 --> 06:13.370 You see, after the brain injury, he could no longer make decisions, any decisions that guided his 06:13.370 --> 06:13.850 life. 06:13.850 --> 06:17.540 So it's not about you're in a store, you see a piece of chocolate, you buy it. 06:17.550 --> 06:18.350 That's an impulse buy. 06:18.350 --> 06:19.700 It's not about that at all. 06:19.820 --> 06:28.190 It's about how did you lead your entire life to get to the point where you were in the store, thousands 06:28.190 --> 06:32.770 and thousands of decisions before that that make you you. 06:32.960 --> 06:42.140 All of that is largely driven by emotion, how you steer your life depending on where in the future 06:42.140 --> 06:44.090 feels good to you versus not. 06:44.120 --> 06:46.250 It's the basis of a lot of your ethics. 06:46.250 --> 06:47.000 Morality. 06:47.000 --> 06:47.840 ET cetera. 06:47.870 --> 06:50.240 It's that deep rooted. 06:50.240 --> 06:59.840 And so understanding that when you sell something to people now, you understand the level of involvement 06:59.840 --> 07:01.130 of their emotions. 07:01.130 --> 07:02.750 It's at every level. 07:02.750 --> 07:10.310 And the deeper you understand your target market, what they fear, what they want, whether they're 07:10.310 --> 07:19.850 more motivated by fears or desires or something else that will help you write sales copy, that speaks 07:20.030 --> 07:28.940 to their very being, to their innermost emotions, and that will make your sales copy wildly effective.