I started in radio in Northern Ontario. I moved quickly from announcing into sales and station management, and I was young when my paycheque became directly tied to whether the station made money.
That meant advertising.
Radio became my laboratory because the feedback was immediate. If an ad worked, the phone rang. If it did not, the client called.
The ads that made the most sense could still disappear
I would write an ad that looked right on paper. The offer was clear. The price was good. The reasons to buy were strong. Every sentence had a logical job to do.
Sometimes nothing happened.
Then a small story, a familiar voice or a human moment I had almost dismissed would move people. The customer had not rejected the facts. The facts had simply failed to give them a reason to care.
That bothered me because I assumed a better argument should produce a better result. Radio kept showing me that people do not experience a message as a tidy list of claims. They feel something first: interest, recognition, desire, doubt, belonging, caution. The facts arrive after a reaction has already begun.
Immediate feedback taught me to watch behaviour
Radio did not let us hide behind a polished presentation for long. We could admire the copy, congratulate ourselves on the strategy and still face an uncomfortable question the next morning: did anybody act?
That pressure was useful. It made me less interested in what people said should work and more interested in what actually moved them.
As my career took me into larger markets, national advertising and business ownership, the pattern became harder to miss. Cars were rarely sold as horsepower alone. Beer advertising was about friendship and belonging. Computers were about what a person might create or become.
The features mattered. They simply did not go first.
The question became bigger than advertising
I wanted to understand why a logical message could be accurate and still fail, while a brief human story could change behaviour. That curiosity led me into behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, but I kept looking for a way to explain the idea in plain English.
The result was the two interlocking gears in The Divided Brain.
The Old Brain is fast and emotional. It scans for meaning, relevance, safety, reward and social signals. The New Brain is slower. It explains, compares and gives language to the choice. The model is a metaphor, not a literal anatomical split, but it has helped me make sense of what radio had been teaching me from the beginning.
Facts matter. They are often essential. But a fact does not automatically create attention, trust or desire. It supports a decision once the message has become meaningful enough to consider.
A useful test for any message
When a pitch, presentation or campaign is not moving people, the instinct is often to add more information. Another statistic. Another feature. Another slide.
Sometimes the message does need better evidence. Sometimes it needs a human reason to matter.
Who is affected? What changes for them? What do they want to protect, become or feel? Why should this matter before the spreadsheet appears?
Radio taught me to ask those questions because the response was impossible to ignore. If the ad worked, the phone rang. If it did not, the client called.
More than five decades later, I still think that is a remarkably honest laboratory.
Paul Larche is the author of The Divided Brain (CanReads 2026 Business/Marketing Winner | BookLife Prize 2025 Semifinalist, 10/10 Score, Editor’s Pick).