Mind Hacks

Seed Magazine have an online article looking at the role of mirror neurons in appreciating spectator sport, particularly in light of the ongoing Winter Olympics.

The article itself is quite speculative, taking some of the conclusions with regard to possible emotional identification with the competitors a little further than the evidence can strongly support, but deftly uses the example of sports as an interesting introduction to the function of the ‘mirror system’.

Link to article ‘Built to be fans’.

The cover article in this week’s New Scientist is about the new generation of wakefulness-promoting and cognitive enhancement drugs being marketed and developed by pharmaceutical companies.

Available drugs, such as modafinil, and those still in development, such as CX717, are being widely discussed as having the potential to alter society as sleep becomes a less necessary comidity.

Although marketed as a treatment for narcolepsy, modafinil is being frequently used by people wanting more work or play time without the cognitive impairement associated with tiredness. This has become so prevalent that it featured in a major article in the Washington Post as far back as 2002.

The New Scientist article is also enthusiastic in its coverage of the new compounds:

If that sounds unlikely, think about what is already here. Modafinil has made it possible to have 48 hours of continuous wakefulness with few, if any, ill effects. New classes of sleeping pills are on the horizon that promise to deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing. Further down the line are even more radical interventions – wakefulness promoters that can safely abolish sleep for several days at a stretch, and sleeping pills that deliver what feels like 8 hours of sleep in half the time. Nor is it all about drugs: one research team even talks about developing a wearable electrical device that can wake your brain up at the flick of a switch.

Although perhaps we can be a bit suspicious of the claim that they have “few, if any, ill effects”, as the history of new drugs shows that major effects are often not discovered until several years after the marketing claims them to be virtually side-effect free (e.g. benzodiazepines, SSRIs).

Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is not available online to non-subscribers, so you’ll have to visit your local library or newsagent to get a copy, but there’s plenty of information on modafinil and CX717 on the net.

Link to table of contents for current New Scientist.
Link to Washington Post article ‘The Great Awakening’.

As well as semiotics and cognitive psychology there is another tool for understanding advertising – neuroscience! Enter neuromarketing [1]. Neuromarketing promises to tell you how your brain responds to branding, or which adverts during the superbowl are most effective (Vaughan did a great job on this one, here, and here), or how alert people are during normal television adverts (“there may well need to be more ads created.” concludes the executive who commissioned the study!)

Neuromarketing leaves people saying things like

But the brain doesn’t lie, and the ad industry is just waking up to the potential of neuroscience. The brain’s seven defined regions – each affecting a different aspect of brain function – literally light up the screen if stimulated. Each one contributes to different cognitive activities; reasoning, analysis, long or short-term memory, high or low involvement processing, emotion, meaning etc.
(Tess Alps, in the Guardian)

The appeal of neuromarketing is the illusion of being able to access some more fundamental explanatory basis for our actions. People may lie to market researchers, or may even deceive themselves, but – we hope – ‘the brain doesn’t lie’. As psychologist and marketing guru Gerald Zaltman said existing methods don’t go nearly far enough in helping [advertisers] move to a closer understanding of their customers [2]

Sadly for marketing science, a straight description of what the brain is doing is of limited use – the marketing implications crucially depend on how you interpret that activity. And the interpretation depends on your theories and assumptions about the mind. If your assumptions are dubious (see the superbowl study) or just wrong (see the Tess Alps quote above) then you’re not going to get anything more than a pseudo-scientific smokescreen.

Perhaps the real appeal of neuromarketing to advertisers is betrayed by this quote from Jonathan Harries, the creative director at advertising agency FCB:

It is very hard for our clients to buy gut feel because every time they approach [a campaign], their jobs are on the line. Neuroscience promises to measure the gut feel, and that is exciting for us. It makes it easier for us to sell what we believe is right [2]

Ref:

[1] Enjoy the marketing of neuromarketing first hand at neurosense.co.uk/

[2] Inside the Consumer Mind : What neuroscience can tell us about marketing, Wendy Melillo, Adweek; Jan 16, 2006; 47, 3