How about … a buzzing cell phone?

According to neuromarketing research expert Martin Lindstrom, we love the soft hum of a silenced cell phone—or, at the very least, we can't ignore it. And that means Madison Avenue won't be ignoring it for long, either.

According to a story on Time.com, about 83% of all advertisements focus, primarily, on visuals to entice us to buy something or go somewhere. Oh, sure, we hear waves crash and seabirds call in certain beer commercials, or the sound of a sizzling steak for a restaurant chain or two. But really, when was the last time you heard sound used as a top-notch subliminal selling point for, say, window cleaner?

But the sounds we hear can be just as influential, if not more so, than the things we see. And there are certain sounds we're programmed, one way or another, to respond to.

The sound of laughing babies blew the doors off every other auditory cue in Lindstrom's arsenal: We listen to a baby laugh, and we can't help but pay attention. And that makes sense on a whole host of levels

The buzzing cell phone, next on Lindstrom's list, was far more intriguing. While I think we're probably genetically programmed to pay attention to whatever sounds babies make (we, after all, have to take care of them, so it'd make just good biological sense that the sounds they make would trigger certain reactions in us), the cell phone couldn't be a pre-programmed relic from earlier times. This is new neural wiring for us: The sound, to our modern ears, may signal connectivity and community. We hear the phone and we think, "Ah, someone wants to talk with me! And I might even want to talk with them, too!" Lindstrom's theory is that our auditory programming is now so tuned in to the phone buzz that, should we hear it during a fast-food ad, we'll be more likely to crave a double cheeseburger.

In fact, a double cheeseburger sounds good right about now. But I digress.

Lindstrom found the third most impossible-to-ignore sound was the fluttery shoosh of an ATM machine doling out cash—which perhaps says something about the premium we place on money. Fourth was the sound of a steak sizzling on a grill. No word as to whether vegans found the sizzle equally enticing.

With Madison Avenue always looking for new ways to sell us things we don't really need, we can expect to hear lots more of these sounds in our future. Lindstrom, frankly, seems a bit surprised that advertisers have largely downplayed our eardrums thus far.

To that, I have two words of explanation for Mr. Lindstrom: mute button.

We all know that today's media, in its many forms, can impact society. That's what the whole premise of advertising is based on, after all. Well, now a coalition of atheist groups is hoping that advertising will help them in their own cause. They'll soon be posting a month-long run of ads in New York City's busy subway stations that feature a picture of a blue sky and wispy clouds, sporting the question: "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?"

Now, putting aside the debatable "good without God" premise, these ads only leave me with one head-scratching thought: What is the burr in these guys' saddles? Why do they find it important to denigrate something they don't even believe exists? I mean, I can't imagine paying gazillions of bucks to make sure the world knows I have doubts about the tooth fairy.

Surely they don't hope to change the minds of churchgoers. Atheists already think that believers are a bunch of misled idiots, right? So why bother? On top of that, the most recent American Religious Identification Survey reported that religion is actually losing ground in the U.S. So it's not like some rising tide of God-fearers is putting a crimp on the lifestyles of the rich and faithless.

On the other hand, the organizers—euphemistically titled the Big Apple Coalition of Reason—say this isn't an anti-religious campaign. Christians, therefore, needn't get irked. The ads are more of a "get the gang together" sort of thing. Which still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They get all these like-minded irreligionists to come together and ... what? Share a collective "we don't believe" high five? Or maybe exchange nonbeliever decoder rings over milk and cookies?

I'm not sure. But methinks it sure doth sound like a lot of effort to rally around not believing in something they're absolutely convinced was never real to begin with.