This is Your Brain on Money

The human mind may be well suited to surviving in dangerous forests and plains, but it doesn't do as well with modern financial decisions. A lengthy and interesting article in Money by Jason Zweig (read it online at CNNMoney.com - Your…

Are Women Better At Sales?

In our recent article on The Mating Mind, we described how "romantically primed" men were much more likely to spend lots of money than men who were not so primed, and than women in either condition. Separately, we've also noted that…

The Best of the Brain

The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain (Edited by Floyd E. Bloom MD; Dana Press, 270 pp.) is a wide-ranging compilation of brain science articles from Scientific American and Scientific American…

Names Disrupt The Brain

"Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language." So said Dale Carnegie, famed author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. As it turns out, Carnegie may have been onto something long…

Facial Coding

When we wrote our recent review of Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds by Dan Hill, our interest in facial coding was sparked. Or, perhaps, re-sparked; when we read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, we found his discussion of facial coding to…

The Neuroscience of Second Life

These days, people are spending a lot of time online, much of it in Web communities and social networks. Second Life is a virtual world in which users create avatars to represent themselves and interact with others. Entrepreneurs have…

Emotionomics

Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success by Dan Hill (Beaver's Pond Press) builds on the premise that "facial coding," the interpreting of the often involuntary expressions our faces make (sometimes called microexpressions),…

Wine and the Spillover Effect

Would wine thought to be from California taste better than wine from North Dakota, even if it was poured from the same bottle? It's no surprise that the answer is "yes" - in Preschool Branding we described how even young children say…

Preschool Branding?

This may not be news to parents of small kids, but branding is a potent force even among preschool children. A new study of preschoolers in California shows that kids will even eat carrot sticks if they come in a McDonald’s wrapper.…