Advertisement and the Brain

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One advertisement that always affects me is the ASPCA commercial that advocates for animals living (and left to die) in shelters. Before even looking at the television screen, I hear the music that plays during the advertisement and am compelled to look away. The faces of the innocent animals who have been abused, abandoned, starved, and neglected makes me depressed! Even more so, it makes me want to adopt all of them, or give all my money to helping them—both of which are not possible for me. I must use my frontal lobe, especially the executive functions of my prefrontal cortex, to refrain from dialing the ASPCA number each time the commercial airs.

The emotional response that I feel can be attributed to my limbic system. Specifically, my amygdala causes me to empathize with the suffering animals. The attachment I feel to animals in general can be traced back to my hippocampus, storing my long-term memories of growing up with dogs, cats, ponies, ducks, squirrels—you name it! Both of my parents have always shown kindness to animals and taken them in when others felt unfit to help. Over the years, my mirror neurons have surely fired thousands of times as I watched my mother bottle-feed a baby squirrel or relieve a stray dog of its fleas.

These reactions would not occur if I could not see the sweet animal faces or hear the sad background music of the campaign. My sight is made possible by my occipital lobe, as photoreceptors in the retina receive the light emitted by the T.V. screen. Cones allow my eyes to pick up on the color and fine details of every precious pet. My temporal lobe allows me to perceive sound, as air waves are translated by the cochlea into electrical signals.  
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