The mind is a mudflow, not a river: why only a clean signal gets through

Ask a buyer why they chose you, and they will give you a tidy explanation: the price was right, the reviews were good, it was convenient, they liked it. It sounds logical. It is almost always beside the point. The mind is nowhere near as orderly as the pretty phrase “stream of consciousness” promises. Inside a person there is no transparent river with a single current. There is a mudflow: a landslide of water, boulders, clay and uprooted trees, all rushing forward together at different speeds and in different directions.

Why it is a mudflow and not a tidy river

The words “stream of consciousness” paint a brook: clean, even, with an obvious direction. The image is pleasant and inaccurate. What actually flows inside is closer to a mountain mudflow after heavy rain. There is no clear water in it. There is clay, rock, sand and branches, and the whole mass moves as one, pressing, churning, cutting itself a new channel as it goes.

In any given second, many things move through a head at once. Fragments of sentences and an argument with oneself. Flashes of images, faces, memories. Signals from the body: a pull somewhere, a tightness. A background anxiety with no obvious source. And on top of it all, a heap of debris: unfinished tasks, a forgotten errand, yesterday’s conversation that will not let go.

This is not a malfunction. It is the working mode of a system through which dozens of processes pass at once. Once you stop expecting clean logic from your buyer, a great deal falls into place.

Why the composition of the flow matters more than intelligence

What you can pull out of a mudflow depends on what it carries. Boulders are stuck past experience, old grievances, unresolved conflicts, other people’s rules a person swallowed and never digested. A stone like that sits in the channel, the water beats against it, silt rises, the flow twists into eddies. Energy goes into getting around the obstacle instead of moving toward the goal. When the flow is even, thought assembles faster and decisions come out sharper. Not because the person got smarter: there are fewer stones to trip over.

This is why the same person at odds with themselves thinks worse than that same person in a calm state. The intelligence has not gone anywhere. The composition of the flow has changed. Keep this in mind when a visitor seems to freeze on your site. Their channel may already be packed to the limit, and your fifth banner was simply the last stone.

For a foreign company this is worth taking literally. A Russian buyer arriving at your page carries extra debris: prices that keep moving, payment methods that changed, brands that left and returned under other names, and a habit of checking whether a foreign supplier will still be here next month. That channel was silted up before you appeared.

Why the customer honestly lies about their reasons

Inside the head there is a part that tries to explain what is happening and assemble it into a coherent story. Call it the narrator. It stands on the bank of the mudflow and comments on what it sees from above: “I am angry because he offended me”, “I bought it because I needed it”.

From the bank you only see the top of the flow: the waves and the foam. The stones on the bottom are out of the narrator’s reach, so it does not count them. Its explanations are after-the-fact guesses. Nisbett and Wilson described this in 1977: people report confidently on the causes of their own behaviour and are frequently wrong, because the causes were never available to them.

That is why surveys and self-reports let you down so often. When you ask a customer “why did you buy”, the narrator answers with a reasonable-looking cause composed on the spot: compared prices, read the reviews, weighed it up. The real reason stayed on the bottom: the colour of the packaging, a familiar voice in the video, three seconds of trust on the first screen. The person is not lying on purpose. The decision was made by layers their gaze does not reach.

The practical conclusion is harsh. If you build a campaign on direct answers from focus groups, you are building on stories from the bank. Listening to them is useful. Believing them as a report of real causes is dangerous. Look at what people do: where the cursor goes, where the tab closes, which form field they abandon. Behaviour flows from the depth of the channel. Words come from the surface.

For a company selling into Russia the asymmetry between the two sources is unusually sharp. The word side is expensive and distorted here: a moderator, an interpreter, translated transcripts, three filters between the narrator and you. The behaviour side is cheap. Yandex Metrica ships session replay, a scroll map, a click map and form analytics inside the free counter, so you can watch real Russian sessions on your checkout page from another country. I wrote separately about the part of a customer that lives the moment rather than explaining it. It is the same split.

What this changes in your ads and copy

If there is a mudflow inside the person, your message is not a letter calmly delivered to a mailbox. It is a signal that has to pass through the flow without drowning. That gives three requirements for any text, screen or ad.

First, the signal has to be clean. The buyer’s channel is already overloaded. Every extra element on the page is one more stone the person has to process. Five buttons, three slogans, a rotating banner and a pop-up at once add silt. A simple message slips between the stones. A complex one becomes a stone itself and produces irritation. Minimalism here is not a designer’s taste. It is an engineering calculation: do not pour more debris into a jammed channel.

The Russian web has its own version of this problem. A typical commercial page here still ships with a callback widget, a chat widget, a quiz pop-up and a discount timer stacked on top of the content, and a local contractor will add the same set to your translated page. Each of them is a boulder.

Second, the signal has to be contrasting. In a muddy flow, the pale disappears. If your ad sounds like ten others, it dissolves into the general noise. You need a drop: a clear difference the eye catches on. Not louder than everyone, but visibly different in the right place. When you set up search and display advertising in Yandex, put this rule first: one ad, one idea, one next step. Everything you added “for good measure” works against you.

For a foreign brand in Russia this has a specific meaning. Local competitors’ ads have been polished against each other for years and converge on the same claims. A headline translated from English lands in the middle of that cluster, saying the same things in slightly stranger words. The difference you actually have, the origin of the product, the warranty, the speed of your reply, has to be the thing the ad says.

Third, the signal has to match the code. The flow rejects the foreign, the way the body rejects a splinter. If your tone, image and promise read as “not for me”, the customer’s system pushes them out without examining them. This is the requirement translated marketing fails most quietly: the grammar is correct, the terms are right, and the page still reads as written elsewhere. A native reader feels it in the first sentence, and the flow closes.

Put the three together and you have a filter for any material. Is it clean, is it contrasting, is it in the customer’s language. Three yeses and the signal arrives. One no and it drowns, whatever you paid for it.

Why the same offer sometimes hits and sometimes sinks

Take an ordinary scene. The owner of a small shop puts a promotion, a block of reviews, the full catalogue, a subscription form and a chat widget on the first screen. In practice the visitor is confused, because the page does not want anything specific from them. Five signals enter their flow at once, collide, stir up silt, and the tab closes. Leave one clear step, say “Choose a product”, and the same visitor immediately knows what to do. The offer did not change. What changed is the amount of debris you poured into their channel.

And the reverse side. A weak, listless offer sinks because it gives no drop. It merges into noise of the same colour and volume, and the customer physically fails to notice it. What makes a message strong is cleanliness and contrast: one idea, presented so that it cannot be confused with the background.

How to check your own flow in practice

Apply this to your own screens. Open your main page and ask one question about every element: if I remove this, does the message get weaker or simply cleaner. You will remove half without loss.

Then read your text the same way. A paragraph of five sentences, each pulling in its own direction, gets abandoned in the middle. One idea per paragraph, and it gets read to the end.

And stop praying to direct customer answers. Asking is useful, but always lay the facts about behaviour next to it: where they clicked, where they left, what they returned. When the words from the bank diverge from what the person does, believe the actions. The gap between “I bought because it was cheap” and “actually the video landed” is where your real points of growth live.

A company is built the same way. A flow of tasks, decisions and people’s energy runs through it and silts up the same way: an unresolved conflict is a boulder the whole team beats against. For a foreign company running Russia through a local partner, the biggest boulder is often the open question of who owns the message, and it shows on every page.

If you want to see where your channel is blocked, bring it to a review. The muddiest stretch is almost always visible only from the outside, because you are standing on your own bank, like that narrator. A free review of your Russian site and ads starts from that outside position.

A river flows beautifully only in the metaphor. Inside you and inside your customer, a mudflow is running, full of stones, clay and yesterday’s worries. The winner is not the one who shouts loudest or writes longest. It is the one whose signal came through all that mud clean and whole.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Психика как поток: почему в голове сель, а не река