Today's LA Times has one of
the most fascinating, disturbing articles I've read in a long time. Here's a fat chunk to get you started.
The volunteer's head was cradled inside a 12-ton medical imaging scanner at Caltech, held firmly in place at the focal point of a pulsing magnetic field. The chamber reverberated with a 110-decibel sandblaster roar.
Behind a double-thickness of shatterproof glass, Steve Quartz, 42, and Anette Asp, 28, monitored the flicker of his thoughts in color-coded swirls on a computer display.
The two Caltech researchers were investigating the effect of perhaps the most pervasive force in a consumer culture -- marketing -- on the most complex object in the world: the human brain.
---snip--
lots more below...
Back to the throbbing MRI:
Psychologists and economists are using sophisticated brain scanners to tease apart the automatic judgments that dart below the surface of awareness.
They seek to understand the cellular sweetness of rewards and the biology of brand consciousness. In the process, they are gleaning hints as to how our synapses might be manipulated to boost sales, generate fads or even win votes for political candidates.
They have glimpsed how the brain assembles belief.
The why of buy is a trillion-dollar question.
When my kids were babies I read a lot of books about early childhood development; at that time cutting edge research was just starting to show how stimulating little brains makes them grow and develop complex cellular connections. You may have seen contrasting brain scans of healthy stimulated kids contrasted with scans of neglected Eastern European orphans. Since then, researchers have shown that similar, measurable changes can be charted in the brain as a person learns, for example, to play an instrument or speak a new language.
Now they're learning about everyday decisions...
By monitoring brain activity directly, researchers are discovering the unexpected ways in which the brain makes up its mind.
Many seemingly rational decisions are reflexive snap judgments, shaped by networks of neurons acting in concert. These orchestras of cells are surprisingly malleable, readily responding to the influence of experience.
But it was only a matter of time.....
Moreover, researchers suspect that the inescapable influence of marketing does more than change minds. It may alter the brain.
It's the same old story. As soon as the incredible new genie is out of the bottle, people are thinking of ways to weaponize it, or at least make a hell of a lot of money.
In that sense, some people may indeed be born to shop; but others may be molded into consumers.
"We think there are branded brains," Asp said.
Maybe so; it's scary to realize how many brands we recognize, but it's much more scary to think that there may soon be tools guaranteed to manipulate brand loyalty.
In Atlanta, a consulting organization called the BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group launched the first neuromarketing company in 2002, promising in a news release "to unlock the consumer mind." The company, whose clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Home Depot, Hitachi and Georgia-Pacific, has conducted experiments with neuroscientists at Emory University in an effort to understand product preferences.
Justine Meaux, the company's director of research, said BrightHouse helped businesses apply neuroscience to marketing, brand development and product innovation.
"It is fantastically relevant research," Meaux said. "A few companies are at the stage where they want to incorporate it into their strategy." She declined to name them.
And of course, to get to the business at hand here at dKos, marketing and politics are almost indivisible:
Already, some researchers have experimented with brain scanning as a way to probe how the brain responds to political advertising.
At the level of brain cells, sophisticated political arguments and party loyalties are reduced, like product preferences, to the activity of neural circuits honed by eons of evolution.
Research suggests that political beliefs appear to trigger the same malleable circuits of reward, identity, desire and threat.
Pretty scary stuff with all kinds of Big Brother-ish implications that people have barely begun to consider. I'll leave you with this:
The findings suggest that brain scanners, like focus groups and polling, could someday be a potent tool in probing voter preferences and the effects of campaign ads.
"When we start asking questions about somebody's political disposition and their brain responses, then we start making interpretations about what defines us as people," said Judy Illes, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "That might have some potentially scary possibilities for misuse."