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I’m contacted periodically by those who think neuromarketing would be an interesting career, and want to get in on the ground floor. At the moment, it’s difficult to steer these individuals (usually college students), because there are no well-defined job descriptions or career paths. Indeed, a quick search of the bazillion jobs listed at Monster.com [...]

The concept of marginal utility, a favorite of economists, is fairly simple to illustrate: a $20 bill is more useful to a financially strapped college student than, say, Bill Gates. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England have now demonstrated the effects of marginal utility on both brain activation and speed of learning in [...]

[photopress:meg_scanner.jpg,thumb,alignleft]The rising star of brain imaging is magneto-encephalography (MEG). Though the technology is far from new and the device looks like something from a 1950s science fiction movie, improvements in hardware and computing power are spiking interest in the technology for both medical and non-medical research. There are now about 100 MEG scanners in the [...]

We recently reported on important new neuroeconomics research in Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior. This study is the first that attempts to correlate fMRI brain scan data with actual purchasing behavior. George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, Brian Knutson at Stanford, and other researchers presented subjects with cash, put them in an fMRI machine to [...]