http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neur...arketing2.html

" Soda has an interesting effect on our heads, too. A century after
Coca-Cola took cocaine out of its flagship beverage, neuroscientists are
learning that soft drinks still work like the illicit drug--as well as
like fat, salt, sugar--on our brains. P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist
at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has demonstrated that
subjects' brains register a preference for Coke or Pepsi that correlates
with the product they choose in blind taste tests. (His study is not
funded by the cola giants.) The brain of "Subject P" on the monitor in
the Human Neuroimaging Lab, for instance, shows he is a Pepsi lover.
After he got 35 alternating, but unidentified, squirts of Pepsi and
Coca-Cola through a pacifierlike device while he was in a scanner, blood
flooded areas of his brain involved in reward and decision making, but
primarily after doses of Pepsi. In the neural taste test of 40 subjects,
Montague found that kind of response less powerful with Coke.

So why does Coke outsell Pepsi? It has to do with the power of branding.
Researchers are starting to decode the neural signature for brand
preference. Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist at the privately held
BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences in Atlanta, says the medial
prefrontal cortex is active when people behold images of things to which
they are extremely attached. In a recent BrightHouse Institute study, 30
subjects were put in MRI scanners and viewed images of products, people
and activities--rock climbing, President Bush, BMWs and the National
Enquirer, among them. "Preference has measurable correlates in the
brain; you can see it," says Meaux, whose company charges on average
$250,000 for such a study. "