This Is Your Brain on Cool

I’m obsessed with The Criterion Collection, a boutique home-video label that specializes in American and foreign classics. It’s a go-to brand for film buffs like me, because it loads its Blu-rays and boxed sets with interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes footage and packages them all with gorgeous cover images designed by great illustrators and art directors. Criterions are a marvel to behold—and I proudly display the 40 or so I own on the bookshelf in my living room. Simply put, they make me feel cool. I know people who get the same buzz from owning the latest iPhone, neon-green Nike gear, distressed-leather boots, or framed prints of Chuck Close paintings. But why? Anticonsumption pundits have long told us that “cool” is just a manipulative notion companies use to separate us from our cash. Marketers create the images; we buy into them. But the authors of two recent books suggest that more is at play than succumbing to ads, self-indulgence, or keeping up with the Joneses. We seek cool for the confidence and social connection it offers. Steven Quartz, a coauthor with Anette Asp of the newly released Cool, began investigating this topic with an experiment in his neuroscience lab at the California Institute of Technology. He asked a group of design students to rate a variety of images—cars, clothes, bottled water, logos, celebrities, you name it—as cool or uncool, and then showed the same images to another set of aspiring designers while scanning their brains with an fMRI machine. The scans showed that when the second group of students saw an image that had, without their knowledge, been deemed cool—a photo of Mick Jagger, for example, or an offbeat brand symbol—their medial prefrontal cortexes went into overdrive. This front section of the brain handles tasks such as daydreaming, planning, and, most of all, self-reflection—that is, it plays a crucial role in helping us shape our identities. Cool products make us feel better about ourselves. Quartz and Asp acknowledge that cool is subjective, of course. Millennials may use Netflix to raise a middle finger to Big Cable conglomerates; a hipster may drive a Ford pickup truck to protest a market saturated with foreign-made cars; a sales rep may carry a Fendi bag to show disdain for mass-produced purses made of faux leather. Indeed, if the second group of students in the experiment had been engineers rather than designers, perhaps very different images would have lit up their brains. So cool isn’t a definable thing; it’s more a state of mind. If something boosts your self-esteem and reflects a stance you want to communicate to the world, it’s cool. That argument jibes with the experience of Kit Yarrow, a clinical psychologist who conducted interviews and shop-alongs with consumers for her book Decoding the New Consumer Mind. She says we’re attracted to products we consider cool (or a good bargain) because they offer a “plus-one” incentive. When you buy a pair of TOMS shoes, or use a car service like Uber, or order meal ingredients through Plated (if these things strike your fancy), you feel more than satisfaction. You feel happier about yourself. Yarrow isn’t sure that this is an entirely good thing. She believes that we’re using shopping as a quick fix to counter the social isolation brought on by the Great Recession, an overreliance on technology, antidepressants, the proliferation of self-help literature, and other dispiriting macro forces, to which she devotes a huge chunk of her book. But she does concede that, whether it’s a helpful coping mechanism or not, our consumption of cool can have psychological benefits. Further Reading Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World Steven Quartz and Anette Asp Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 Decoding the New Consumer Mind: How and Why We Shop and Buy Kit Yarrow Jossey-Bass, 2014 Quartz and Asp certainly believe that this quest can lead us to meaningful social experiences. Cool isn’t just catnip for our egos; it makes us want to connect with others—to feel that we’re rebels, yes, but that we have partners. And because our culture has splintered into millions of micro-niches, styles, and lifestyles, this desire to find like-minded souls who share our tastes and values has grown tenfold. I’m a case in point. Although I collect Criterion films to reinforce my outside-the-mainstream, art-over-commerce sensibilities, when I see one on someone else’s bookshelf, I instantly feel part of an exclusive club, secret handshake and all. These arguments may sound a bit idealistic: What’s cool? You decide—and then watch it enhance your well-being and relationships. But in an era when technology gives us access to so many different products and services—and constantly bombards us with ads for them—why not use cool as a signal to guide you through the noise? Buy what seems innovative and fashionable to you, feel like a better version of yourself, and strengthen your social connections as a result.

This Is Your Brain on Cool

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