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Neuromanagement: The Rule of Three?

26. January 2010

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Neuromanagement: The Rule of Three?

Trivia question: Why were local phone numbers originally seven digits long? The answer is that in the early days of local phone service, researchers found that seven digit numbers were about as long as most people could remember without forgetting or making errors. (One oft-quoted study on the “seven” topic is The Magical [...]

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Green Marketing: Light Up Sales

19. January 2010

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Green Marketing: Light Up Sales

“Green marketing” usually refers to using an environmental pitch to sell a product. A car creates less pollution, a paper product is made from recycled content, and so on. Results of appealing to environmental sentiment have been mixed. On one hand, the Toyota Prius has sold better than would be justified purely [...]

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Food, Shelter, and Big Words

15. January 2010

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Food, Shelter, and Big Words

Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that humans had a hierarchy of needs, with food being at the most basic level of biological need and shelter one step above as part of a “safety” need. He may have been on the right track, according to new research led by Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University. [...]

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Brain Fitness: Skip the Sudoku, Be a Volunteer

22. December 2009

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Brain Fitness: Skip the Sudoku, Be a Volunteer

Just-published research in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences shows that volunteering and similar social activities are helpful in staving off mental decline in later years, and can actually improve cognition.

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Some Learn From Mistakes, Others Don’t

21. December 2009

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Some Learn From Mistakes, Others Don’t

In Managing by Mistakes, I wrote about the power of learning from mistakes. Some of the most successful individuals in different fields credit relentless focus on even small mistakes with their high achievement. Researchers at Columbia University divided student subjects into two groups, “grade hungry” and “knowledge hungry” based on a short survey, [...]

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Neuromarketing at Microsoft

11. December 2009

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Neuromarketing at Microsoft

Video games and movies are one of the more interesting neuromarketing applications, in that the technology can be applied to not just advertising but the product itself. A new effort by Microsoft and Emsense carries that idea one step further by attempting to compare viewer engagement with advertising across multiple technology platforms, including Xbox [...]

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What Wakes You Up? Men vs. Women

8. December 2009

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What Wakes You Up? Men vs. Women

If you wanted to market a new cold and flu remedy intended to help suffering men and women get the rest they need, it might be helpful to know what kind of sounds are most likely to wake them up. At least that’s what a company hired UK-based neuromarketing firm MindLab to find out. [...]

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First-time Scents are Memorable

8. December 2009

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First-time Scents are Memorable

We know that smells can evoke memories – think Proust’s madeleine – but new research shows that first-time scents seem to merit a unique status in our brains. The researchers used fMRI imaging to judge how well people paired scents and objects a week after their first exposure…

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Ants and Humans

3. December 2009

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Ants and Humans

If the late Nobel Laureate Herb Simon were still around, I’m sure he’d be fascinated by neuromarketing. He did a lot to explode myths of human behavior, notably that people always behave in a rational, utility-maximizing, manner. I never met Simon during my student years at Carnegie-Mellon (though I did serve on a [...]

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Go Viral, the Neuro Way

1. December 2009

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Go Viral, the Neuro Way

Much of the content on the web is created by users (“user generated content,” or “UGC”), but only a small amount of that is actually interesting enough to generate substantial interest or “go viral.” A new study by OTOInsights, a division of One to One Interactive, looks at user-created videos and flash animation from [...]

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