In keeping with the theme of two (Cortex/Limbic, Dopamine/Oxytocin), we are going to talk about two specific ways that the brain interacts with its environment. The first is The Transaction.

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The Transaction is short-lasting,

feels pleasurable if it succeeds,

and you need more of it over time.

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The Transaction is a neural process that starts in the frontal lobe of the Cortex, specifically the Prefrontal Cortex. This part of the brain is the primary “reward” center, helping humans make rational, logical decisions. It is what we use to measure value, identify efficiency, experience success, make comparisons and determine utility. It is fundamentally rooted in the action of comparison.

For The Transaction to occur, your Prefrontal Cortex catalyzes a series of five key neural steps that flow through the rest of the brain, ultimately resulting in a positive or negative outcome. Those five steps are as follows:

1. An image or representation of the comparison being made is formed in the brain,

2. Value is assigned to the different things being compared,

3. The values are compared and a choice is made,

4. The desirability of the outcome is experienced, and

5. The brain learns from outcome through the issuance of dopamine.

These steps form the basis of The Transaction. 

The Transaction is not just about buying things. The Transaction is anything that the brain is comparing and assigning utility to. It could be deciding to buy a spatula online, and your brain compares the value to you of having that spatula to the value of retaining the time it will take to buy it, and the cost of the spatula, etc. Or it could be sitting in front of a slot machine, deciding to keep putting quarters in.

But The Transaction can be much more abstract than that. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and compared yourself to how you looked when you were younger? If so, you were Transacting with yourself at that moment. Your brain was comparing two representations, and assigning value and “choosing” to like one or the other. As you can imagine, once you understand what The Transaction truly is, you will see that we are completely saturated by it.

The Transaction is driven by clear, definable steps and is highly measurable and observable. Because of how easily it is for businesses to see how The Transaction results in revenue (which is the most basic measure of business success), consumer technology companies have organized themselves around The Transaction, through frictionless interfaces providing maximum utility in the fastest timeframe at the cheapest price.  Innovation in business has vectored towards the mathematical limit of hyperdigitization, with the goal being volume, efficiency, scalability and growth. 

Silicon Valley has spawned a generation of companies that see:

People as users,

Experience as product,

Choice as conversion,

Failures as bounce rate,

Service as automation,

Loyalty as “Net Promoter Score,” etc….

These concepts, bolded and italicized, are extremely human things. But the concepts these businesses convert them into are reductive, cold and analytical. The dehumanization of these facets of human experience serve a clear purpose, and that is to maximize focus on what is important to the product, service or business as a whole. If people are consumers to a business, then the act of consumption is the only thing the business cares about. If a person is a user, then using the product is what matters. This active reduction is the result of a brute force business model evolution that optimizes the steps underlying the neural process leading to The Transaction, where…

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Optimizing Customer Behavior

Becomes a Mechanical Process

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There is a concept that permeates modern Transactional business theory, which is the “Funnel.” Think of the Funnel as a war of attrition that most companies are fighting…how many nameless, faceless people can my company get into the top of the Funnel, and how much money can I expect will fall out of the bottom?

Imagine you’ve just launched an app, and in your planning session you are hoping for one million customers to download it this year. Perhaps out of those one million downloads, maybe 800,000 users will open the app, 600,000 will engage with it, 400,000 people will open it multiple times in a month and 200,000 people will authorize the app to charge their account for a subscription. This is a Funnel, and for the vast majority of companies, the only thing that matters through this process is that you, as a user in the Funnel, eventually converts (i.e. money falls out the bottom).

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For most Funnels, the customer relationship

comes into play after conversion.

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The Funnel is an excellent way of maximizing The Transaction. It allows for retailers, social media networks, media companies, entertainment businesses, home services, digital applications, marketing agencies, etc. to reduce human beings down to their most basic, monetizable components and optimize the amount of money that can be extracted from an experience, product or service. To many of these companies, their customers are simply eyeballs connected to their fingers, with the five steps of the Transaction that sits between engagement and clicks being stimulated repeatedly.

While we are all bouncing around in all of these Funnels, our brains are secreting dopamine to help us learn from these choices we are constantly being asked to make. These businesses know this, and they have created an endless parade of dopamine “triggers” for us to experience in order to cause as much dopamine to be issued by our brain as we make the choices those companies want us to make. We see them all the time….

Maybe you’ve seen companies tell you that their product will get to you extremely fast, if you buy it as quickly as possible…

And it keeps getting bigger…

But while all these dopamine triggers do work in the short term, there is a very big problem that all of this Transactional stimulation causes.

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And we are all feeling it.

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