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If you're like most people, you're way too smart for advertising. You flip right past newspaper ads and never click on ads online. That, at least, is what we tell ourselves. But what we tell ourselves is nonsense. Advertising works, which is why, even in hard economic times, Madison Avenue is a $34 billion-a-year business. And if Martin Lindstrom, author of the best seller Buyology and a marketing consultant, is correct, trying to tune this stuff out is about to get a whole lot harder. Lindstrom is a practitioner of neuro-marketing research, in which consumers are exposed to ads while hooked up to machines that monitor brain activity, pupil dilation, sweat responses and flickers in facial muscles, all of which are markers of emotion. According to his studies, 83% of all forms of advertising principally engage only one of our senses: sight. Hearing, however, can be just as powerful, though advertisers have taken only limited advantage of it. Historically, ads have relied on jingles and slogans to catch our ear, largely ignoring everyday sounds. Weave this stuff into an ad campaign, and we may be powerless to resist it. To figure out what most appeals to our ear, Lindstrom wired up his volunteers, then played them recordings of dozens of familiar sounds, from McDonald's ubiquitous "I'm Lovin' It" jingle to birds chirping and cigarettes being lit. The sound that blew the doors off all the rest—both in terms of interest and positive feelings—was a baby giggling. The other high-ranking sounds, such as the hum of a vibrating cell phone, an ATM dispensing cash, and etc, were less primal but still powerful. In all of these cases, it didn't take a Mad Man to invent the sounds, infuse them with meaning and then play them over and over until the subjects internalized them. Rather, the sounds already had meaning and thus triggered a cascade of reactions: hunger, thirst, happy anticipation. "Cultural messages that get into your nervous system are very common and make you behave certain ways," says neuroscientist Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine. Advertisers who fail to understand that pay a price. Lindstrom admits to being mystified by TV ads that give viewers close-up food-porn shots of meat on a grill but accompany that with generic jangly guitar music. One of his earlier brain studies showed that numerous regions, jump into action when such discordance occurs, trying to make sense of it. TV advertisers aren't the only ones who may start putting sound to greater use, retailers are also catching on. Lindstrom is consulting with clients about employing a similar strategy in European supermarkets.