Derren Brown is a British “mentalist” and entertainer. He has a number of fascinating videos over on You Tube, including this classic – quite simply, the most persuasive illustration of nonconscious processing I have ever seen. When you click on the video below, you may have to follow the link over to You Tube to [...]
Vaughan over at Mind Hacks published a post the other day about how we tend to synchronize our blinking when watching video stories. He strongly endorses a podcast on the subject, which I confess I haven’t listened to yet.
But I did have a chance to download the referenced study by Nakano et al. entitled “Synchronization [...]
I have written before in this blog about the the question of whether nonconscious processes need to be “protected” from stimuli that trigger them. The need for protection is derived from a belief that these processes are somehow more vulnerable than conscious processes, and further, that stimulating them can make us do things (specifically, buy [...]
I haven’t picked on the fMRI folks for awhile, but was inspired today by a new post over at the excellent neuroscience-of-language blog Talking Brains entitled “Functional brain imaging, it’s not always where you think it is.” And that reminded me that I also wanted to write something about an excellent article in Scientific American [...]
I posted way back in the day about “the neuroscience of beauty,” and find this an ongoing fascinating topic.
I saw yesterday on the excellent BRAINETHICS blog that a new book has just been published on the topic, edited by Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian, titled “Neuroaesthetics”.
According to my source for all knowledge semantic and syntactic, [...]
Zack Lynch, whose coverage of the neurotech industry I’ve followed for some time, has written a new book with co-author Byron Laursen called The Neuro Revolution. According to Amazon, it will be released on July 21.
Zack recently posted a very interesting interview about the book on his Brain Waves blog. The interview was conducted with [...]
In a recent post haranguing against the term “neuromarketing”, I referenced Mya Frazier’s front-page piece in Advertising Age back in September 2007, “Hidden Persuasion or Junk Science?“. As noted in that post, the neuromarketers she portrayed went more than a little overboard in their efforts to extol the virtues and magic of their techniques, and [...]
As if the fMRI community wasn’t taking enough hits (as summarized in earlier posts on this blog, here and here), a real bombshell went off when a pre-print version of a paper with the catchy title “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” began to circulate.
The paper made a provocative charge, that much of the fMRI research [...]
A simplistic approach to advertising effectiveness tries to draw a straight line from an ad’s internal characteristics – its creativity, catchiness, product depiction, value proposition, memorable characters, etc. – to a product’s success in the marketplace.
Some neuromarketers try to exploit this simple view by claiming that their testing can identify “winning” ads that will directly [...]
We put another downloabable document on the Lucid website today called “Tell me something I don’t know: Consumer insights from preconscious processes.” You can grab a copy on our download page here.
The article was inspired by a client who sent us the following request:
I was asked by a senior manager for an example of the [...]