Yesterday I attended a lecture by Jonah Lehrer, who is, first of all, way too young to be so smart. He talked about the confluence of science and art (extending some of the ideas in his book, Proust was a Neuroscientist). One of his premises is that the reason art is valuable in our culture is it helps us to think about thinking, or “metacognate.”

Reflecting on my job, I realized that one thing I do is to use the elements of fine art (visuals, sound, text) to short-circuit metacognition. You could say that one definition of good marketing is to get people to jump directly from the reception of a message, to acting on the message, without the intermediary step of rational thought. (My social media counterparts will argue with me a little there, I think).

The paradox is that although I spend my day working out how to get people not to use their prefrontal cortex, I do it by spending a lot of time thinking about thinking. How do people behave? How do they react? What motivates them? What are the subconscious associations someone will have when reading one phrase vs. another phrase? When seeing one image vs. another image? My business is to persuade and to bring about behavior change.

I have always gotten a kick out of metacognition (I recognize this, now that I know what it’s called). There are those out there who are proud of being “Joe Sixpacks,” who would label me an “intellectual” (ouch!) or “navel contemplator.” I am now able to point to the practical uses of metacognition in changing behavior. I could even go farther and predict that (if we creatives are as good as I think we are) those of us who don’t metacognate are going to be increasingly controlled by those of us who do. In fact, I think it’s already true.

That’s why the word of the day is: metacognate!