Neuromarketers may be their own worst enemies. Neuromarketing, and its slightly more established sibling, neuroeconomics, are exciting areas in which new research findings pop up every week. Unfortunately, the rush to commercialize the…

Most scientists have dismissed the idea of reading minds using technology as pure science fiction, but Carnegie Mellon University researchers have moved a step closer to doing so. Not only have they been able to identify which of several…

Neuromarketing technology is relatively new on the scene, and has been employed primarily by deep-pockets corporate customers. Application to politics has been mostly general and academic; my 2006 piece, The Neuroscience of Political…

People remember things better when they screen out irrelevant inputs. Now, Swedish researchers have found that the basal ganglia area of the brain seems to be responsible for the filtering process. Dr Torkel Klingberg and colleague Fiona…

Big companies often find great ways to aggravate their customers, and cell phone giant Sprint proves the point. John Wall of the Ronin Marketing blog posted a rant about Sprint's advertising for their Centro Palm smartphone, Screw Your…

What do mathematicians, architects, sculptors, biologists, and graphic designers have in common? They all use what is perhaps the most interesting number in mathematics: the Golden Mean, also called the Golden Ratio and the Golden Section.…

I've been waiting for the first news of neuromarketing in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and it has arrived a full year before the election itself. The first few conclusions seem so obvious as to not require firing up a…

Neuromarketing readers are by now familiar with the idea of "buying pain" or "pain of paying" - when we buy something, the pain center in our brain can be activated. Work by Carnegie Mellon's George Loewenstein and others shows that this…

It's Halloween, so Popular Mechanics must want to scare its readers. The magazine has thrown fuel on the fire of neuro-alarmism by running a November issue cover story by Jeff Wise talking about "digital thought police" and filled with…

We are subjected to a constant stream of branding messages - company logos, brand emblems, and even distinctive designs are, quite literally, everywhere. In addition to conventional advertising media, it seems that just about every item…