Reading a person's thoughts may still be science fiction, but researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University are making surprising progress in specific types of "mind reading." The team, led by computer scientist Tom Mitchell and cognitive…

Why do people do things that will gain them social approval? It turns out that the same parts of the brain are activated for a positive social outcome as for a monetary reward. In other words, the same reward circuitry is turned on both by…

  Erotic images sell better than pictures of office supplies, and a lot better than photos of hairy spiders. Who knew? Actually, that's a bit of an oversimplification. Stanford researchers led by neuroeconomics prof Brian Knutson have…

WIRED ran an interesting piece that suggests increasingly invasive brain technologies will become a legal battleground. The more obvious areas have already been discussed here and elsewhere: using brain scans as lie detectors or to see if…

Readership of Neuromarketing keeps growing, but now Yale researchers have published a paper that reveals my dirty little secret...

Businesses are often portrayed as rapacious partners, seeking to squeeze every penny out of their deals. Indeed, some are... the result is often a relationship between defined by a fat contract that seeks to protect both parties against…

Are the non-medical applications of fMRI and other brain imaging technology overrated, or are we seeing the birth of a major new field of study? Ofri Ilani and Yotam Feldman of Haaretz have written a lengthy survey piece that starts by…

Popular books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, not to mention generations of comedians, have played up the differences between males and females. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Haifa have found…

Berkeley neuroscientists report that they have been able to identify images subjects looked at solely by analyzing fMRI scans of the subjects' brains. Jack Gallant and his team at the University of California Berkeley published their…

East Asian subjects process a picture differently than their North American counterparts, according to a study published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study used both eye tracking and conventional…