Neuroscience Research

"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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

The Mating Mind. A prof at the University of New Mexico has an interesting suggestion: the evolution of the human brain was largely driven by finding better ways to appeal to the opposite sex. Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory…

Despite the pretty pictures generated by today's fMRI machines, they are lacking in both spatial and temporal resolution. Siemens is addressing this issue by commercializing a new kind of scanner technology that uses an array of sensors to…

We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…

"About 95% of all thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our conscious awareness." -Gerald Zaltman, in How Customers Think This is a basic premise of almost everything we write about here at…