Word: braining
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...recent Wednesday night, Eleanor Phipp spent an hour watching commercial television. Nothing unusual about that - except that Phipp, 30, was in a dark room at a south London medical center, lying inside a loudly whirring Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) scanner that mapped her brain as video images flickered before her eyes. Brain scanners - which use radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to trace oxygenated blood to areas of neural activity - are mainly used to study or diagnose brain diseases. But Phipp's brain was being scrutinized for decidedly nonmedical reasons. Researchers were monitoring how it reacted...
...study is being run by Neurosense, an Oxford-based consulting firm that's a leader in the fast-growing industry called neuromarketing. Neuromarketing uses the techniques and technologies of neuroscience - particularly FMRI scanners - to better understand how our brains react to advertising, brands and products, reactions that mostly occur subconsciously. This burgeoning ability to peer inside the black box of the brain to see how it processes images and messages and reaches decisions potentially gives marketeers a new tool that can be used to fine-tune ads and marketing campaigns, bolster or extend brands, or design better products...
Indeed, companies as diverse as Unilever and DaimlerChrysler have used neuromarketing. Viacom Brand Solutions, the commercial arm of MTV Networks, for instance, late last year had Neurosense study how viewers digest programming and ads. It looked at nine regions of the brain that control such functions as attraction, long- and short-term memory and understanding. One counterintuitive result: commercials generated more activity in eight of those nine cortical regions than the programs did, indicating that ads do register with viewers. But programming dominated the ninth area, which controls absorption - indeed, viewers were so absorbed by the programs that the other...
...Medicine in Houston - which was published in the academic journal Neuron - used FMRI technology to determine that cola drinkers subconsciously have warmer feelings for the Coca-Cola brand, and that gives Coke an edge over Pepsi, even though Pepsi performs as well as Coke in blind taste tests. Brain scanning is the field's dominant technology, but other technologies and techniques are used as well, often in conjunction with FMRIs. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology that can read electrical signals pulsating from brain cells, is popular because it detects how quickly the brain reacts to stimulations. But unlike FMRI scans...
There's no shortage of academic debate over the merging of neuroscience and marketing. The journal Nature Neuroscience, under the headline brain scam?, has editorialized that too many practitioners' claims remain unpublished in peer-reviewed journals. But the dearth of published results is largely the result of businesses wanting to keep their findings secret. Brammer admits that the data deficit leads to "some scientists interpreting what we're doing skeptically...