Our media consumption patterns may be known in microscopic detail, yet the motivations behind those patterns are largely assumed. The result of these quite dangerous assumptions: Small, often untraceable shifts can happen in our aggregate media consumption patterns each year that, over time, can subsequently cascade into a major avalanche of change that can seem to come from nowhere. Why, for example, does someone decide to watch TV for a whole evening rather than curl up by the fire and read a good book? Or for that matter, why would a consumer decide to undertake either of these two pursuits in preference to enjoying a magazine, a radio program, or streaming video? Underlying these questions is the fundamental motivational principle that affects the consumption of all media channels. It underpins the media ecology that helps shape each of our professional lives. Yet we won't find the answer in MRI, Simmons, Nielsen or any other major industry media research source.How many marketers still didn't know what blogs were three or four years after the term was first used in 1999; or thought Twitter, created in 2006 and now topping 10 billion tweets, wasn't an issue until quite recently; or to this day may never have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, arguably the Paul Revere of the social marketing revolution.In their monograph, Media Generations, Professors Block and Shultz of Northwestern University posited the view that our primary media habits are predominantly shaped by the media we experience at an early age. They are encapsulated in the phrase: You are what you grew up with. They expanded on the idea as follows: ... the experiences of childhood, especially in teenage years, impact the shape and course of later life ... That is, the way media and marketing communications are learned during childhood determines the patterns for the rest of one's life, even though new media and technologies appear ... Boomers use the Internet, but they use it differently than do Millennials who grew up with it. The notion that exposure to a medium at an early age leads to an innate familiarity with that channel makes eminent sense. Yet our implicit literacy of a medium probably stretches beyond our simply being immersed in that channel at an early age. Focusing on the three mass media that have emerged since the middle of the 20th Century - TV, computer and mobile phone - aka the three screens, we can unravel how each screen engages the various functions within our brain.Neuromarketing proves the three screens of TV, computer and mobile are handled by the brain in quite different ways. Ways that consumers cannot necessarily describe themselves. Our brain's ability to process an experience is far more advanced than our ability to verbalize that experience. Neuromarketing reveals our brain processes an event at 300 to 500 thousandths of second after the experience whereas as our conscious brain, the thinking of which we're all aware, starts to engage at about 500 thousandths of second and beyond. At a recent Advertising Research Foundation meeting, Dr. A.K. Pradeep of Neurofocus, a leading neuromarketing research agency, isolated the essential differences in how the three types of screens communicate. By scrutinizing consumers' precognitive responses, the responses before conscious thinking fully engages, Dr. Pradeep was able to demonstrate the relative communications strengths of each channel: