A speculative thesis from Connelly Partners on consciousness, holography, and why moving people’s souls is not a metaphor — it may be physics.
Steve Connelly, President & Copywriter, Connelly Partners
At Connelly Partners, we have long held a belief that guides every brief, campaign, and conversation with a client: to move people’s feet, we must first move their souls.
For decades, this felt like philosophy. Increasingly, it looks like science.
A growing body of research — from neuroscience to quantum physics to consciousness theory — suggests that human decision-making is not a rational process colored by emotion. It is, at its core, a feeling process that gets rationalized after the fact. And the most provocative frontier of that research raises an even bolder possibility: that what we call the “soul” — the place in a person where meaning lives, where a message either lands or doesn’t — may be less metaphorical than we imagined. It may be a frequency. And advertising, at its best, may be an act of tuning.
Part I: The Science of Feeling First
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — the region that processes emotional signals in decision-making. What he found upended the Enlightenment’s central assumption about human rationality. These patients were intelligent and articulate — but they could not make decisions. Without the emotional signal, the rational mind had no mechanism for choosing.
His landmark finding: emotions are not noise. They are the prerequisite for decisions. Before logic weighs in, the body registers a feeling — a somatic marker — that pre-screens options, elevating some and eliminating others. Damasio called it an “internal alarm.” Not irrationality. The system worked exactly as designed.
The advertising research confirms what Damasio’s neuroscience predicts. A Nielsen analysis of 100 campaigns across 25 brands found that ads scoring above average on neuroscience-based emotional measures generated a 23% lift in sales. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s landmark analysis of over 1,400 IPA campaigns found that purely emotional campaigns produced a 31% profitability increase versus 16% for purely rational ones — nearly twice the ROI. A 2025 study conducted by Columbia University neuroscientist Professor Moran Cerf for Seedtag found that ads aligned to the emotional tone of their context delivered 3.5 times higher neural engagement and a 26% lift in positive, action-driving emotional response.
The soul, in other words, is not a soft target. It is the most efficient path to the decision.
Part II: The Brain as Hologram
Here is where the science gets stranger — and more interesting.
Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram spent decades puzzling over a problem no conventional brain model could solve: why does memory survive injury? When large portions of brain tissue were removed in animal experiments, subjects still retained learned memories. The information wasn’t stored in any single location — it seemed distributed everywhere. No matter where you cut, the whole remained.
This is precisely how a hologram works. In a holographic plate, every fragment contains the interference pattern for the entire image. Cut the plate in half and you get the whole picture, slightly less sharp — not half a picture. Pribram proposed that the brain encodes memory the same way: as distributed wave-frequency patterns across neural fields. His decades of laboratory data convinced him that “whatever comes into the brain becomes distributed” — stored in a frequency domain describable by the same mathematics used to create holograms.
His model went further: the brain doesn’t record the world like a camera. It performs a frequency transformation — converting waveform inputs from the senses into the coherent objects and experiences we perceive as reality. Perception isn’t passive recording. It is an active translation between frequency and form.
Part III: The Universe as Hologram
Physicist David Bohm arrived at a compatible theory from the opposite direction — from quantum mechanics rather than neuroscience. Bohm observed that quantum particles that had once interacted seemed to influence each other instantaneously across any distance, as though space posed no barrier at all. He proposed that the separate, distinct world we perceive — what he called the “explicate order” — is a surface unfolding from a deeper, enfolded reality he called the “implicate order”.
The best analogy for the implicate order, Bohm argued, was a hologram: a distributed whole from which any fragment can reconstruct the complete image. Consciousness, he believed, operates between the two orders — between the visible world of space and time, and the deeper field where “everything is internally related to everything”.
In his 1991 book, The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot synthesized Bohm and Pribram’s parallel frameworks into a single proposition: that the universe itself functions holographically, and that the human brain — also holographic in its processing — is a smaller piece of that larger whole. Each mind, in this view, contains a perspective on a universal pattern of information that underlies physical reality.
Part IV: What This Means for Advertising
Most advertising models assume a world of bounded, separate individuals — each one a container to be filled with messages, persuaded through argument, moved through incentive. The brief is to reach them. The goal is to change what they think.
But if the holographic model is even partially correct — and it remains speculative, a hypothesis rather than settled science — then a different picture of the consumer emerges. Not a container, but a receiver. Not a rational agent processing inputs, but a frequency-sensitive consciousness, perpetually translating between the world of surface signals and a deeper order of meaning from which those signals arise.
In this picture, authentic stories move people and manufactured ones don’t — not just psychologically but perhaps structurally. Authentic communication is coherent: the surface signal aligns with the deeper pattern of meaning it represents. Manufactured emotion is incoherent: the signal and its source are misaligned. The receiver detects that dissonance, even if the rational mind cannot name it. This would explain Damasio’s somatic markers from a new angle. The gut feeling that a brand rings hollow — that the ad feels false — may be the brain’s holographic processing detecting interference between the signal received and the deeper pattern it purports to represent.
In physics, resonance occurs when an object vibrates at the same natural frequency as another, amplifying both. In marketing, the same principle applies: when a brand’s message operates at the same emotional frequency as its audience, the impact multiplies. This may not be a metaphor borrowed from physics. It may be the same phenomenon, at a different scale.
The Speculative Thesis
Connelly Partners’ belief — to move people’s feet, we must first move their souls — has always been intuited from practice: from the campaigns that worked and the ones that didn’t, from the creative that moved people and the creative that didn’t.
The emerging science of consciousness offers a compelling framework for why this is true:
If the holographic model of consciousness is correct, then human beings are not passive recipients of information — they are active participants in a universe where meaning is distributed, non-local, and present at a level deeper than the visible world. A brand communication does not create meaning. It either resonates with pre-existing patterns of felt human experience, or it doesn’t. Moving the soul is not a poetic device for emotional engagement. It is a description of what actually happens when a frequency-coherent communication reaches a frequency-sensitive receiver.
This is why authenticity cannot be faked — not just as brand strategy, but perhaps as a matter of physics. Manufactured signals are incoherent. Incoherent signals don’t resonate at the level that matters. They may register at the surface — but they do not move the deeper pattern. They do not move the soul. And without the soul, the feet don’t follow.
A Note on Speculation
This is deliberately framed as a hypothesis, not a proof. The holographic universe framework is serious science, advanced by physicists and neuroscientists of the highest standing — Bohm at Princeton and Berkeley, Pribram at Stanford. But it remains contested and unverified as a complete theory of reality.
What is not speculative is the neuroscience of emotional decision-making. Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis is among the most well-evidenced theories in cognitive science. The advertising effectiveness research is robust across hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and industry analyses.
The leap — from “emotions move decisions” to “consciousness may be holographic and advertising may be an act of frequency resonance” — is offered in the spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity. Connelly Partners has always believed the best advertising asks the biggest questions. This is one of the biggest: What, exactly, is a soul? And what does it mean to move one?
We don’t have the complete answer. But we think the question is worth asking out loud.
References
Somatic Marker Hypothesis – Wikipedia
We’re Ruled by Our Emotions, and So Are the Ads We Watch – Nielsen
The Dangerous Power of Emotional Advertising – Tasawwar Karim, LinkedIn
Seedtag Releases First-of-Its-Kind Neuroscience Study – Seedtag
RATIONAL v EMOTIONAL – Andy Greenaway, LinkedIn
The Organization of Memory by the Brain – Karl Pribram (PDF)
Karl H. Pribram – Wikipedia
Some Comments on the Nature of the Perceived Universe – Karl Pribram
Bohmian Wave Mechanics, Holographic Universe – David Bohm
Tuning the Mind in the Frequency Domain: Karl Pribram’s Holonomic Brain Theory and David Bohm’s Implicate Order – Shelli R. Joye, Cosmos and History
Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics – Karl Pribram
The Holographic Universe, D.Bohm & N.Haramein – My Quantum Life
David Bohm and the Implicate Order – Documentary Excerpt
The Holographic Universe – Michael Talbot
The Psychology of Resonance – Emilie B., LinkedIn
