Tags:

Neuro-Optimized Products – Good or Evil?

Every little while, a neuroalarmist rant pops up in the blogosphere, almost always from someone who read an article about neuromarketing and concludes, "My goodness - now they'll manipulate my brain into buying all kinds of stuff I don't…

Hollywood Goes Neuro

Neuromarketing is coming to a cineplex near you. In an interview with Caltech's Steve Quartz, The Guardian reports that movie makers are starting to use fMRI brain scans to evaluate consumer preferences and predict future recall of…

Decision Making, Risk, and Reward

In Scientists Identify Brain Region Responsible for Calculating Risk versus Reward, Scientific American reports on new research shedding more light on the neuroscience of decision making. Nathaniel Daw and John O'Doherty of University…

No-Contact Brain-Machine Interface

Wouldn't it be exciting if you could control a machine with your thoughts? Without surgery or electrodes stuck to your scalp, and without a lengthy learning/training process? Well, that possibility is detailed in ATR, Honda Develop New…

Why Neuro-Alarmists Have It Wrong

A week doesn't go by with some blogger reading about neuromarketing, fMRI ad studies, and the like, and then posting, "This is creepy - very Orwellian! Pretty soon we'll all be buying stuff we didn't want or need!" While neuroscience DOES…

Mirror Marketing: More on Mirror Neurons

A few months ago, we mentioned "mirror neurons", which fire when a subject watches another subject perform an action. If the subject has performed the action before himself, these neurons will duplicate, or "mirror" the, action in the…

The Neuro-acquittal of O. J. Simpson

Research on the neuroscience of political persuasion suggests that by turning the O. J. Simpson trial into a debate on racism, defense attorney Johnny Cochran may have allowed the jurors to process testimony in a partisan and emotional way,…