Bigger Brain = Social Media Success

Hiring a social media manager or a salesperson? Maybe you should have the finalists’ brains scanned in an fMRI. A larger orbital prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision-making and cognitive processing, has been shown to correlate with greater social skills, according to a study by a team of UK researchers. Among [...]

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Sugar as Brain Food

This isn’t great news for dieters, but sometimes sugar can be a good thing. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, had subjects perform a mentally taxing task – watching a video while being careful to ignore random words scrolling across the bottom of the screen. (Apparently, it takes quite a bit of concentration [...]

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How We Decide

Book Review: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer Jonah Lehrer has been translating neuroscience into prose comprehensible by the lay reader for years, and How We Decide helps readers understand and even apply current research in the process of human decision-making. Lehrer begins with a look at expert decision-making, and how individuals with the right [...]

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Measuring TV Program Engagement

One of the problems with measuring the viewership of television programming is that counting viewers doesn’t give advertisers or programmers any information about how engaged the viewers are with the content. Two Australian firms, PBL Media’s Nine Network and Neuro-Insight, have launched an effort dubbed PEP – program engagement power – to rectify that. Engagement [...]

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Show You Trust Your Customer

Want your customers to trust you? Demonstrate that you trust THEM! This may seem counterintuitive, but there’s sound neuromarketing reasoning behind it. The concept revolves around that seemingly magical neurochemical, oxytocin, which is a key factor in forming trust relationships. Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University and [...]

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