Archive for December, 2006
Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Voodoo Neuroeconomics
In neuromarketing, it’s not uncommon to see a big leap from actual research data to a questionable business conclusion. It turns out that neuroeconomics research can be similarly used. You can be the judge of whether BrandMillion.com is one of these wacky and unsupportable leaps or the Next Big Thing. The firm’s […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroeconomics by Roger Dooley
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
NY Times Cautious on Brain Fitness
The recent publication of a study showing that performing mental exercises improves subjects’ ability to perform those tasks, even years later, has caused a flurry of interest in brain fitness. (See New Evidence for Brain Fitness.) Today, the New York Times reviews the literature on brain fitness in As Minds Age, What’s Next? […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Thursday, December 21st, 2006
Deal or No Deal
The wildly popular television game show, Deal or No Deal, is a televised neuroeconomics experiment (or would be if you could scan the brains of the participants as they played): each week, contestants choose to accept a fixed amount of money, or keep playing with the possibility of a still-higher payoff. In each round […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroscience Research, Neuroeconomics by Roger Dooley
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
New Evidence for Brain Fitness
A new study led by Sherry Willis, a human-development professor at Penn State University, appears to provide more evidence that brain training can affect cognitive decline associated with aging. The study provided some subjects with brain fitness exercises and compared their functioning to a control group that didn’t receive the training.
The memory training included […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Monday, December 18th, 2006
The Hungry Customer
Food marketers love hungry customers as they are certainly in a state where tantalizing images may be particularly effective. Oddly, it turns out that hungry people may take in all kinds of information more quickly. The New York Times recently reported on the findings of Yale researchers in Empty-Stomach Intelligence:
A team led by […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Monday, December 18th, 2006
Neuromorality?
A church-based site, Vision.org, has published an interesting and thoughtful article by Thomas E. Fitzpatrick, Are We in Need of a Neuromorality? The article covers some of the same issues discussed in more detail in the book, Hard Science, Hard Choices by Sandra J. Ackerman, but is based largely on the comments of Martha […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuroethics by Roger Dooley
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Comedy and Marketing
Our recent post, Laughing Matter: Priming and Mirroring, cited new research showing that hearing the sound of laughter produced a response in subject’s brain in the premotor cortical region, triggering an unconscious smile and apparently preparing the subject to laugh.
This work almost certainly provides the neuroscience backup that explains why television comedies have resorted to […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Laughing Matter: Priming and Mirroring
We’re always interested when neuroscience research shows how people respond to external cues, and some new research into the effects of sounds may well have neuromarketing implications. Researchers played a series of sounds for subjects and monitored their brain activity with an fMRI scanner. The sounds were either positive in nature (laughter, triumph) […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
Brain Fitness and Selling Neuroscience
It’s been a while since we posted Marketing Neuroscience: Brain Fitness, and I’ve noticed that interest in the entire brain fitness and cognitive enhancement area seems to be heating up. I was reminded of that after seeing a few television commercials for Nintendo’s Brain Age game. While Microsoft and Sony are pushing shoot-em-up […]
No Comments » - Posted in Neuromarketing, Neuroscience Research by Roger Dooley
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
Book Review: Hard Science, Hard Choices
Meeting notes from a neuroethics conference hardly seem like fodder for book club meetings, but Hard Science, Hard Choices by Sandra J. Ackerman (Dana Press, 2006, 174 pages) is likely to produce far more spirited discussion than the latest Oprah selection. Ackerman has rendered a readable summary of the discussion at an unusual […]
Subscribe
