The stuff my cartoon addled mind can picture is akin to brainwashing with a black and white spinning spiral. That or extensive, repeated exposure to certain stimuli, clockwork orange style.
Better priming seems like the best we could hope to achieve, in a sense, outside of things we’d probably be better off not getting into?
This is probably why there's this enduring trope about going to the hardware store and getting stuck for hours and walking out with too much stuff. You're already in the project mode and there to buy things you need. Very easy to grab just one more thing. Like, why is hobby lobby still a thing?
A simple example in legacy media is with Coca Cola. The ads show good experiences and attempt to anchor those emotions to real life events, and then the tag line Enjoy. So your enjoyment is tagged with having a Coke. Relatively straight forward.
These days, and this is still an emerging technology. Ads can be built and constructed on a per user basis. So rather than generalizing, you can synthetically anchor ideas onto individual real life emotions. And then at the right time have the systems massage in the idea of compulsively making a purchase. So while not strictly black and white spinning spiral. It's more interception at a particularly vulnerable moment. At least in my observations.
Please God no. We've already pasted every surface on the planet with ads, no imagine not being able to ignore that crap. Sellers and propagandists would fill the world with more bullshit.
I'd say it's a quite important lesson in UI/UX design, and interfaces generally. As per the article, our brains are primed to:
> actively constructs event boundaries based on internal priorities rather than passively responding to environmental cues
Explains why ads effectivity is low, why a lot of users miss obvious cues, and why UI design is so hard. It's something a lot of professionals know intuitively and through anecdotal evidence.
It is quite interesting to see research dig deeper into it, and possibly research/develop better "levers" to pull human attention more efficiently - essentially make us remember things. Priming was long understood to help, and that's primarily from observation/empiricism. Deeper insights into how the brain itself handles this could be game changers.