The Packaging Industry is Obsessed with the Wrong Thing

Walk into any supermarket and you will see hundreds of packages competing within a few feet of one another. For years, the industry has treated this as an attention problem. Make the logo bigger. Use a brighter color. Break the category codes. Create something unexpected. The logic seems obvious. If people do not notice you, they cannot choose you. But neuroscience suggests we may be starting with the wrong problem. In a recent paper, neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl Miller propose a different way of thinking about how the brain makes sense of the world. Rather than passively receiving sensory information and then figuring out what it means, the brain is constantly using past experience and context to predict what it is likely to encounter.

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