The Craving Spot

The Craving Spot: Why you buy

“Tomato sauce cloaks ground lamb in moussaka, ground beef in pastitsio, and adds sweetness to savory dishes. Green beans, zucchini, artichokes, fava beans and okra are routinely stewed with tomatoes.” —from www.kokkari.com/cuisine/

Why you buy

What happens in your brain when you buy something, that doesn’t happen when you don’t?

The Wine List

The sunlight falls pale as a winter sunset through the open window at Kokkari Estiatoria (Restaurant—4.8 stars) in San Francisco where I am sitting watching people make decisions.

And, oh my, do they make decisions at Kokkari. The bar is one of two or three power bars in San Francisco where politicians and celebrities cut deals and where people who want to be politicians and celebrities squeeze closer together trying to overhear what deals are getting cut. The media are disguised like spies around the tables and in the second or third row deep at the bar.

Improbably, one of the very best restaurants in San Francisco is Greek. There is a giant open fireplace where lamb and chicken rotate over the glowing split wood fire, coffee pots sit deep in sand, and if you know where to look, there is a private little room downstairs surrounded by hundreds of bottles of wine.

The menu is in Greek with English translations, but even with the translations most of us don’t know what the item is exactly or how it’s made. The flavors in Greek food can be intense and vary greatly. The wines are hard to pronounce in English since Greek has several sounds that English doesn’t have and the names of grapes can look the same as the names of places or people.

That means that people who don’t speak Greek (most of us) must rely heavily on the waiters and the sommelier to explain the food and wine both before we can decide anything.

So, here I sit, observing the American consumer in their natural habitat, making hundreds of decisions simultaneously right before my very eyes. What’s an Assyrtiko (one of the best Greek red wines) and where exactly is Santorini? (an island off the coast of Greece in the Mediterranean.)

What are Gigantes (really big beans in tomato sauce) or Soutzoukakia (lamb meatballs)?

Here’s a look at a small part of the wine list:

Glinavos, Vlahiko Red, Ioannina '18 58 Evening Land, Passetoutgrain, Eola-Amity '19 65 Alpha Estate, SMX, Amyndeon '17 75 Trisaetum, Trisae Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley '18 60 Anatolikos, Fine Mavroudi, Avdira, Xanthi, Thrace '17 90 Aterberry Maresh, Old Vines Pinot, Dundee Hills '18 90 Gerovassiliou, Avaton, Epanomi '14 115 Anthill Farms, Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast '19 64 Thymiopoulos, Uranos, Naoussa '18 100 Emeritus, Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley '19 90 Diamantakos, Xinomavro, Naoussa '18 80 Oakwild Ranch, Pinot Noir, Russian River '18 64 Costa Lazaridi, Amethystos 'Cava', Adriani Drama '17 95 Ghostwriter, Amaya Ridge Pinot, Santa Cruz Mtns. '18 85 Tsantalis, Metoxi, Cabernet-Limnio, Mt. Athos '15 72 Hope & Grace, Doctor's Pinot Noir, Santa Lucia '16 75 Skouras, Megas Oenos, Pelononnese '17 75 Seven Hills, Merlot, Columbia Valley '18 50 Tsantalis, Reserve, Rapsani '1

You can see why this is a target rich area for observing human decision making. Sommeliers nod wisely, waiters silently appear beside your tables, and diner’s heads shake in wonder at it all.

The thing is, every single one of these people believe they are making the decisions —clearly, rationally and consciously.

They aren’t.

The Magic Shower Cap

Once upon a time, I walked into a dark little room where I was given an old shower cap to put on, with wires sticking out all over it like dead asparagus. I looked like the character in Star Wars that got cut from the bar scene for being too strange.

As soon as the researcher plugged in my swell new hat, brightly colored pictures of my brain appeared on the computer screen in front of me and began moving and shifting like a cold front moving across a TV weather map.

Some areas were bright red, some bright blue and some ominously dark, apparently devoid of any activity whatsoever.

With my brain that’s not surprising.

The colors were measuring changes in “hot” and “cold” areas of my brain activity. When I thought about wine, one area lit up. When I thought about the San Francisco Giants’ long relief pitching, a different area lit up and the first one went down.

They are not really hot or cold. There are just some areas with more activity which the powers that be decided to make red, and other areas of low activity, which they decided to make blue.

Naturally, I asked them, what happens when somebody buys something?

The thought had never crossed their minds. They were looking for eternal truths, I was looking for a sale.

These days researchers are finally asking the same question I did, looking for a much larger truth than the asparagus people: what makes you buy one thing and not another? Why Xenomavro and not Thymiopoulos?

Trying to figure out what your brain wants is called “Neuro-marketing.” Cool.

People are marketing to your neurons—skipping your conscious mind all together.

This turns out to be way more accurate than just walking up to people on the street and asking them how they feel about the existential environmental threat of Big Macs.

Your mind has a mind of its own. The “craving spot”—Nucleus Accumbens—”lights up” (shows more intense activity) when you decide to buy something. https://blog.cognifit.com/

What’s going on inside that head of yours when you choose a wine?

The particular part of your brain that lights up and unconsciously makes the decision you think you’re making rationally is called the nucleus accubens, otherwise known as the “craving spot’.

At last, a subject worth studying. The nucleus accubens craves everything but I’m in enough trouble already, so I’m going to stick to craving alcohol, and therefore wine.

The same would be true of beer or shovels or I Love Lucy reruns.

Or, people. Hmmm….

You have no idea how many people want to know why you buy something.

The answer to this question is worth literally trillions of dollars. Or, yen. Or drachma. Whatever.

What makes you buy that cabernet is too big a question for a shower cap with dead asparagus on it.

But, these days they have replaced my cap with a giant 4- million-dollar metal donut roughly the size of a pick-up truck, which is fetchingly named the MRI machine (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). MRI’s are much bigger and more sophisticated than my shower cap, but they do exactly the same thing--they map brains. In color yet.

All this to find out why you buy asparagus instead of Mexican melons. Hmmm. Asparagus seems to be developing theme here.

Oh, I know. Why don’t they just ask you?

It would be a lot cheaper. But, the trick, as I said earlier, is that none of us know why we buy one thing instead of another. Or, why we buy anything at all for that matter.

Oh we have reasons. Yes we do. Lots and lots of reasons—price, size, label, free trade, fertilizers, family farms, not family farms—the list is endless.

But, according to the brain studies, these explanations of why you buy appear long after the decision to buy has been made by the brain. Our reasons for doing anything come after the fact. Your thoughts are not making the actual decision.

All those reasons you think you buy wine for are actually afterthoughts.

Your craving spot likes what it likes, regardless of what you think about it.

In fact, what you think about it, is irrelevant.

The thing with brains is, brains don’t lie. Your brain doesn’t have opinions about rainfall in Bordeaux in 1966 or the three grapes used in Spanish sparkling wines. It just lights up or it doesn’t. When it lights up, you buy.

Lighting up brains has become a big business.

Surprises show up when you do this, for instance:

Anti-smoking ads actually increased the desire to smoke.

Curious. Telling people not to drink, just makes them drink more. Apparently, brains don’t do “no.” Telling your brain not to do something doesn’t really work out the way you thought it would.

How to get you to buy

Well, if I want you to buy more wine it certainly seems like the best thing I can do is tell you not to buy it. As dramatically as possible.

Your own passionate desire to make anyone stop doing something guarantees that they will do more of it. When you advertise or proselytize against drinking or smoking or sex, you just make people want to drink and smoke and have sex more.

Yes, I know this is counter intuitive, and you probably don’t know why that would be true, but then that’s the point.

The same thing that is making all those people in Kokkari decide to get Avgolemeno (Greek Lemon Chicken Soup) instead of Maroulosalata (Salad with Feta) decides which color car we choose and who we marry. Or, don’t.

You and I are invisible slaves to our craving spot.