Patrick Renvoisé: Selling Your Brain

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cognitive science

Interdisciplinary study that attempts to explain the cognitive processes of humans and some higher animals in terms of the manipulation of symbols using computational rules. The field draws particularly on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, psychology (see cognitive psychology), linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Some chief areas of research in cognitive science have been vision, thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, learning, and language processing. Early theories of cognitive function attempted to explain the evident compositionality of human thought (thoughts are built up of smaller units put together in a certain way), as well as its productivity (the process of putting together a thought from smaller units can be repeated indefinitely to produce an infinite number of new thoughts), by assuming the existence of discrete mental representations that can be put together or taken apart according to rules that are sensitive to the representations' syntactic, or structural, properties. This “language of thought” hypothesis was later challenged by an approach, variously referred to as connectionism, parallel-distributed processing, or neural-network modeling, according to which cognitive processes (such as pattern recognition) consist of adjustments in the activation strengths of neuronlike processing units arranged in a network.

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marketing

Activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers. In advanced industrial economies, marketing considerations play a major role in determining corporate policy. Once primarily concerned with increasing sales through advertising and other promotional techniques, corporate marketing departments now focus on credit policies (see credit), product development, customer support, distribution, and corporate communications. Marketers may look for outlets through which to sell the company's products, including retail stores, direct-mail marketing, and wholesaling. They may make psychological and demographic studies of a potential market, experiment with various marketing strategies, and conduct informal interviews with target audiences. Marketing is used both to increase sales of an existing product and to introduce new products. See also merchandising.

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