Why You SIMPLY NEED To Know About Stephen Pinker's Strawberry Cheese Cake If You're a Challenger Brand

One Vital Evolutionary Psychology Lesson for Challenger Brands - You SIMPLY NEED to know about Stephen Pinker’s Strawberry Cheesecake Theory

I was inside an Egg. My skull was the Egg. My brain was the yolk. Swirling. Swirling around like mercury. Poisonous, furious mercury. Swirling. Swirling. Swriiiiiilllllllllling. Smashing the sides of my cranium. Swirling. Swirling. Angry Furious Yolk. I’ll tell you why I was angry.

At a restaurant recording a podcast (can’t say the name). Worked my little creamy tits off for this. Two days later, they said “you’re not allowed to release it.” No text. Nada. Just an whiny-whiffy-whimsical email from their team.

On reflection, fuck ‘em. Vagabond Vogue Nerds.

Calculus, Choir Boys, Carhartt and Clarence Court Eggs Cruisers

Little Nerds at school. Perfect Prefects. Parents-don’t-swear-or-shag. Played squash to County level. Loved Maths and Robinson’s Orange Squash. Diluted personalities: the grey beige of bleacher seats and off veal sweetbreads curdled with Doctor’s Surgery 4.14pm breath.

Brockley-Birkenstock Boffin-Brigade who take half pills of Vitamin B12 at DrumSheds. cutting rug & Chopping WaterMelon Lost Mary’s.

“Mateeeee… can… you… hear… me??!!….can you…please… Shazam this naughty track… the drop is ABSOLUTE FLITHY RAGGO mate… wanna add it to my Brockley Park 5 K Bangers running Mix”

Anyway rant over. Fuck 'em. We move.
One question we were talking about.

“Why does Illustration and Art and Food work so well?”

What’s it doing?
Is it an unfair advantage?

My scraggly theory:

Illustration is art filled with emotion and excitement - it primes you to feel emotion and excitement when you eat. Illustration is Art and Music combined. It bounces, moves, grooves.

Check out some examples below:

Noble Rot Magazine

Pringles Man

Pretty much every hipster pizza restaurant

Olive Oil brand - Graza

I know what you’re thinking:

“ohhhhh shaddap you hooty-fluety, woo-woo wah-wah wanky Toff.
“Just eat the fucking pizza and get a proper job, mate.”

Well, Yep.

But, pretty-please bare wiv me.

The following day, I was reading, “The Ape That Understood The Universe” by Steve Stewart Williams.

I stumbled upon The Strawberry Cheese Cake Principle by Stephen Pinker

CRASH.BANG.WALLOP.
Everything clicked.

Stephen Pinker is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Stephen Pinker also won the Noble Prize for the Biggest Shlid on Planet Earth in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2023.

In his book `How the Mind Works' he has a theory called The Strawberry Cheesecake Principle

**FYI his second seminal book is also a great read:

“Where To Go To Get a Fucking Shlid Like Me: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of 55 Turkish Barbers in Staines on Thames”

The Strawberry Cheesecake principle explains why humans are obsessed with music, art, fiction, stories, sugary foods.

And is a potential answer to Why illustration and food work so well together?

Illustration and food is a unique relationship.

Pinker argues:

We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water.

Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it packs megadoses of agreeable stimuli concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. Art may be a third.

The visual arts are one example of a technology designed to defeat the locks that safeguard our pleasure buttons and to press the buttons in various combinations.

Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once"

Music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties

Paintings, photographs, movies and television, cunningly violate OUR assumptions and give off patterns of light that dupe our visual system into seeing scenes that aren't there.

Everyday photographs and paintings depict plants, animals, landscapes and people. Biologists believe that the geometry of beauty is the visible signal of adaptively valuable objects: safe, food-rich, explorable, learnable habitats, and fertile, healthy mates and offspring.

That's the lock-picking.

My interpretation

If Music is Strawberry Cheesecake for the Ears. Illustration is Strawberry Cheesecake for the Eyes.

Illustration is a verbose art form that packs a VISUAL sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it packs megadoses of agreeable stimuli concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons.

Illustration is a visual pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the EYES to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once

Illustration is pressing our pleasure buttons and defeating the locks that safeguard our pleasure buttons.

Illustration is the lock-picking.

Illustration is Adaptive, too.

What makes something adaptive?

From an evolutionary perspective (God, I sound like a Brockley Birkenstock Boffin)

Something is adaptive if it helps an organism survive in its environment. For example, a physical trait, mental capacity, or behaviour that makes an organism better able to eat, shelter, defend itself, and mate is said to be adaptive.

• Large brains in Neanderthals

• Variation in beak shapes between species of passerine birds

• Dark coloration of moths during the industrial revolution in England

A Darwinian would say that ultimately organisms have only two jobs

1. to survive

2. to reproduce.

Adaptive features short cuts in our brains helping us survive and reproduce.

Illustration is adaptive it’s saying on a VERY BASIC HUMAN LEVEL: “look come here mate, this food is delicious and it’s going to help you survive and look after you’re family and reproduce”

Pinker argues Music is Strawberry Cheesecake for the Ears. Illustration is Strawberry Cheesecake for the Eyes.

Primes the senses, gives the promise, that eating this food is 1. delicious 2. going to help us survive.

That’s just my theory.

Pretty-pease may you do me a huge favour, you wonderful human. This newsletter took me +18 hours to compile + write. It’ll take you literally 10 seconds to forward it on to a friend. Please may you ping it on to someone? We grow one recco at a time. Hugely grateful for your support xx #Jah Bless

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Still Hungry? Course you are…

Please feel free to gorge on the most downloaded podcast episodes of all time (these are CERTY: BANGERS)

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3. Spencer Matthews: How Spencer Matthews Built Unshakeable Resilience and Raised + £10m to Launch Clean Co. in Sainsbury's, Tesco and the U.S.A. 

4. How Grenade Exited to Mondelez for £200 Million and Lessons in Unapologetic Authenticity- Juliett Baratt

5. Tyrells Tycoon: How William Chase built and sold Tyrells for £50 million and sold Chase Distillery to DIAGEO 

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