Archive | August, 2006

Is God in Your Brain?

31. August 2006

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Is God in your brain? Or, to put it in different terms, is an intense religious experience merely a neurological phenomenon? Could one artificially induce a spiritual event by stimulating specific areas of the brain? While we aren’t at the point where we can flip a switch to get godly, intriguing new [...]

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fMRI Studies of Anti-Smoking PSAs

29. August 2006

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Just about all of the fMRI studies we’ve seen or heard about are for commercial advertisers, but it looks like the neuromarketing bug has bitten the smoking cessation crowd. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have conducted a pilot study of brain activity in subjects viewing anti-smoking PSAs:
Functional MRI of Brain Response to Anti-Smoking [...]

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Book Review: Future Hype – The Myths of Technology Change

28. August 2006

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FUTUREHYPE: The Myths of Technology Change, by Bob Seidensticker, is to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near as antimatter is to matter. Put them next to each other on your bookshelf, and your house might be leveled as they combine with a gigantic release of energy. Sedensticker’s key thesis is that technology changes [...]

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Nanowires To Monitor Neurons

25. August 2006

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Neuroscientists are constantly looking for better ways to measure brain activity, and Harvard researchers have achieved a breakthrough that should significantly advance the state of the art. MIT’s Technology Review, in Nanowires Listen In on Neurons, describes the development of silicon nanowires that are so small that they can be used to measure activity [...]

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Neuroscience, Leadership, and Marketing

22. August 2006

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Stephanie West Allen, who writes the Idealawg blog (there are at least a couple of puns in that clever title), forwarded a link to an interesting article, The Neuroscience of Leadership. The article, authored by David Rock and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz and published in Strategy+Business, is a fairly lengthy treatise on behavioral change. [...]

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Forbes on Neuroeconomics

21. August 2006

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A few years ago, Forbes drew considerable attention to the field of neuromarketing with their landmark article, In Search of the Buy Button – now one of our “neuromarketing classics”. An article published earlier this year, This Is Your Brain On Money, isn’t quite as extensive, but is still an indication of the continued [...]

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Why Negative Ads Work: Framing, Emotions, and Irrational Decisions

7. August 2006

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It’s no great surprise to marketers, or even most semi-aware humans, that people often make decisions based more on emotion than on rational processing of information. Oddly, for decades economists ignored this apparent truth, assuming that business managers strove for maximum profits, buyers and sellers slid smoothly along supply and demand curves until they [...]

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USA Today Highlights Neuroeconomics

7. August 2006

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One of the most relevant and potentially fruitful areas for marketers hoping to employ neuroscience as one weapon in their arsenal is neuroeconomics – in essence, the neuroscience of decision making. Neuroeconomics seems to be more focused and more accepted than the embryonic field of neuromarketing; the latter field, of course, will benefit directly [...]

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Neurobashing and Legitimizing Neuromarketing

4. August 2006

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Adweek, in 4A’s Planners Define Their Lot, states that a former ad exec “convincingly shot down the legitimacy of neuromarketing”. Here’s the complete description of the supposed shoot-down:
Mark Earls, the former executive planning director of Ogilvy & Mather, convincingly shot down the legitimacy of neuromarketing, comparing it to “navigating to Mars armed only with [...]

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