Imagine you're sitting in a waiting room, a travel brochure on the table in front of you. With nothing better to do, you pick it up. The cover shows a beach somewhere warm, and for a moment, your mind drifts there. You put the brochure down and don’t think much of it, until three days later, when you find yourself booking a holiday.
Could that wandering mind have actually made you more likely to consider the holiday?
We like to think that food choices are mainly about taste, price, convenience, or health. But new research suggests that something much less obvious can also influence what we choose: whether God is on our mind.
Researchers from La Trobe University and Monash University conducted six neuromarketing studies to investigate how God-related cues influence food choices. Across different settings and methods, they found that higher God salience increased consumers' preference for ultra-processed foods compared with unprocessed foods. The mechanism behind this effect is perceived healing by God.
Imagine walking into a store and seeing two identical eco-friendly detergents side by side. One has a clear price tag: $8.99. The other says: "Scratch to reveal your discount, somewhere between 5% and 20%."
Which one pulls your attention?
For most people, it's the second one. Not because the potential savings are necessarily better, but because something about the unknown makes your brain lean in. That itch to find out, that small rush of curiosity, changes how you think about the product entirely.
This is not a coincidence. It's psychology at work.
Picture this. You put on a VR headset, watch three minutes of a forest landscape with birds and rustling wind, and your brain measurably relaxes. Now swap that for three minutes of wingsuit flying at full speed through trees and rocky cliffs. Your brain does something different entirely. You don't relax. You detach.
A team of neuroscientists decided to find out what VR actually does to the brain. They measured it directly, and the results were clear.
Imagine standing in front of a classroom of thirty teenagers. You are halfway through explaining a math problem when a student in the front row shoots their hand up enthusiastically. At the same moment, a student in the back corner starts loudly imitating their classmate, drawing snickers from the row beside them.
Two things happen simultaneously. Where do your eyes go?
