The Creation of Memory and the Imprint Process

The father of "Imprinting" is (Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) who pioneered the study of imprinting methods and mechanisms in animals. His most famous research was conducted with goslings where he imprinted himself as their mother. Lorenz discovered that the first experience of animals created imprinted behavior patterns that lasted for life. He proved that these imprints even defied biology as he became the pied piper to many families of ducks, birds, and dogs over his lifetime of research. Dr. Lorenz was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973.

The brain uses thoughts to store experience. Thoughts combine to create memories and imprints. These thought structures are comprised of two components, a rational (declarative) and an emotional component. The stronger the emotional component, the more powerful the encoding. An example of a familiar encoding pattern is a "phobia" which is simply a one trial learning experience charged with emotion. Most people cannot remember the initial details surrounding the original phobic event, they are just left with an intense automatic reaction to the trigger of the phobia (snakes, bugs, heights, etc.). By the way, principles of Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be used to undo a phobic imprint by manipulating the submodalities of the experience.... but that's another topic.

Every experience (phobic down to the most mundane) consists of this declarative and emotional component. The imprint syntax is: experience creates thoughts, thoughts create memories, memories combine into imprints. Imprints are charged with varying levels of emotion. These imprints become the filters we use to perceive reality. The bottom line is, if you want to understand a person's reality, you've got to decode the imprint structure and the emotion that is encoded and stored in their brain surrounding a specific personal reality.

Does this mean that we must decode every customer's brain to discover the structures, the emotions, and hence the triggers that drives their buying behavior? In the ideal situation, yes. In the practical sense, certainly not. Fortunately we can decode imprints springing from experiences we shared as children, having a common cultural background, and thus extrapolate general behaviors to many consumers who share that common background.

Here's how the imprint decoding process works. Suppose Pepsi was interested in discovering the first imprint in the American culture for soda pop. Most of us would never give this a second thought, but if you were Pepsi, making billions of dollars each year selling soda pop, you'd probably want to know how soda pop was imprinted the first time in our childhood brains. Remember, these first imprints create the filters that unconsciously drives our behavior as adults.

So how do you find out? One way the Decoding.com methodology, is to get a group of adults in a room, let them have fun, relax, draw, remember, talk to each other, sell soda pop to an alien, make choices about soda pop, and go back to their childhood and remember in vivid detail the very first experience when they drank their first soda pop. Where were they? Who were they with? What did it taste like? What do they remember touching. What were they seeing? What were they hearing? What smells were associated with the experience? What emotions were present? This information is incredibly "rich" in both content and structure. To a researcher trained in decoding this data, it is a fascinating puzzle that can be solved piece by piece.

As all this data in analyzed using linguistic patterns and word filters, repeating structures begin to emerge defining the first imprint in little American boys and girls surrounding soda pop. These repeating structures define in broad terms, the imprint for a large group of people, namely the American soda pop drinking public. Armed with this information, Pepsi could now design great commercials and products that get in touch with deep seated memories to give consumers the feeling, "Hey, I like it and I want it!"

Lorenz was right. Early imprints can make us do amazing things, and can keep us doing them long after we have rationally figured things out. All our imprints are encoded and stored safely in the brain, driving behaviors, creating perceptions, and making us believe we understand reality. Decoding these imprints and translating them into marketing tools allows clients to give their customers what they really want. The great news is that consumers love a correctly positioned product and are happy to reward us by taking it off the shelf and putting it in their shopping basket.

Imprinting of horses

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