fMRI + Marketing = Consumer Control?

anonomouse writes "NYT magazine has an interesting article on the use of neuro-imagery in marketing. Best (old) quote: 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half'. Good, bad, whatever? Does this bode well for job opportunities for the new crops of cognitive systems graduates? Most importantly, what does brain state tell us about behavior, if anything?"

fMRI assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

fMRIs only say there is significant activity above some baseline. It does not always equate to thoughts, processes, etc. Refer to this [slashdot.org] comment for an example.

functional scans

[sireenmalik]

Its PET or fMRI for functional scans. If i understand it correctly with MRI there are two clear advantages over PET scanners:
1. no radio-active agent is needed, and
2. the radiologists get the functional as well as the anotomical details- the flesh and its function, to say vulgalrly.

With the latest 3D imaging tools available with diagnostic machines its easy for the neuro-surgeons to plan the surgeries to much better detail.

Marketing is another issue. Obviously the customers are either radiologists or neuro-surgoens. The two people are tuned to their professional habits. It would be hard for the marketing/sales people to cause the change. My opinion is that companies need a pack of very good application-specialists. Application-specialists are breed of people who not only understand how the phased-array coils work but can also explain the C, T and L spine to the radiologists with equivalent ease! So maybe the diagnostic companies focus on their applicaiton-specialists instead of wasting too much on ads etc. Pure marketing/sales skills will not be enough for such a specialized tool.

Re:One word. Looker.

[pair-a-noyd]

Off topic my ass.

Watch the movie. It's 100% relevant to the topic. It's prophetic.

It's not a T&A movie as the shallow of mind would think, it's about mind control and marketing. The use computer generated models combined with mind controlling embedded signals to not only compell people to buy things they don't want/need they end up using the same technique to convince people to vote for a faux presidential candidate.

Jeez people, can't you ever use your minds to see through the bling-bling to see the underlying message??

EVERY movie made sends a message. Most are contrived to form opinions and mold minds. Commercials are no different.

Commercials are attempts to control your mind and secure your soul..

THINK!!!

Human Evolution & Other Competitive Pressures

[MuParadigm]

I suspect you're right, though really we're only talking about a couple hundred thousand years of evolution. Homo species prior to Sapiens probably didn't have the kind of symbolic processing ability that would make such linguistic or visual appeals, or the the ability to resist them, evolutionarily important, even if they had language, which is also under question. And in any case, the combined Homo and Austro primate branches have only been around for about 5 (+/- 1) million years.

However, let's say that a technique that can be shown to influence peoples buying and desire patterns, with a mechanism that can be adequately understood outside of statistical correlation (such as a visual-linguistic technique that provokes desire for an object through creating a dopaminic/serotonal cascade in a portion of the brain) exists and is discovered.

In that case, I expect one of two things would occur:

A) The technique would be made illegal, as being unduly intrusive and controlling, or

B) All advertisers would start using it, thereby negating the advantage it could give any particular advertiser.

These constraints might compel researchers in the field to avoid explaining, or even looking for an explanation of, how the effect actually works. Instead, they'll probably just identify certain correlations in focus groups between MRI results and patterns of desire and consumption (buying).

I wonder what would happen to such people. Would they be better paid than individuals in your typical focus group? After all, going through the MRI process would be far more intrusive, tedious, and time-consuming than sitting around a table answering questions.

What would happen to people who exposed themselves to such testing on a repeated basis? Would they become obsessives or fetishists, like the characters who went through SB-5 trials in William Gibson's "Idoru" and "All Tomorrow's Parties"? Given the amount of TV most people watch, would we accidentally create a society of such obsessives? Would MRI comparisons, between people who watch TV on a regular basis and people who don't, show that we've already created such a society?

Hmm, if nothing else, it could make for a good SF novel. But then, I suppose Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" has already covered some of this territory.

Very dodgy science, IMO (done PhD in fMRI)

[itchyfidget]

Firstly, you can't have a "stronger" or "higher" or "larger" fMRI response - the most you can have is a larger probability that the signal you are reading in a particular region of the brain is not due to chance but to manipulation of your experimental variable (in this case, the drink being drunk). A comparison between two such probabalistic values (in the article, the degree of 'activation' in the ventral putamen) is pretty much meaningless. The experiment also doesn't control for the possibility that more people in the sample just prefer Coke (at least, from the information given in the article, this is the implication). One of my supervisors was approached a couple of years ago by a film distributor, who wanted to show fMRI pictures of someone just sitting, versus someone reading a book, versus someone watching a film - the desired effect being, of course, to show that films recruit more of the brain. Duh! It would have worked, and been a legitimate thing to do - but they wanted it in a matter of days (and with pretty pictures too!) - this stuff takes time, at least with our facilities it does. So, no deal. In terms of whether fMRI and similar techniques tell you anything ... hmm. Kinda. But results are consistently over-interpreted by many in the scientific community, and as has been pointed out in other posts, fMRI measures local blood flow, not neuronal activity (blood flow, by the way, can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as caffeine, which is a vasodilator ... so if either Coke or Pepsi contained more caffeine than the other, that could partially account, potentially, for differential fMRI results) And don't even start me on using functional imaging techniques as "lie-detectors" ... There's a long way to go, and anyone who says different really IS selling something.

Re:fMRI measures blood flow, not brain activity

[Subetai]

Anonymous Coward said:

Less than 50% of the time, when you average the neural activity over several SECONDS (an action potential lasts 0.015s), and over 1 cubic CENTIMETER (containing 10^8 neurons), fMRI tells you something about that average activity.

While this is true for the majority of fMRI work done today, things are changing. Higher field strengths have greatly increased the spatial resolution of fMRI. Typical voxel size at 3 Tesla is down to about 3 mm to the side (echoplaner, BOLD contrast). As higher field strengths become more common, voxels will become much smaller.

Temporal resolution has also improved. A lot of the older fMRI work uses block designs (e.g., two conditions, control and experimental, 30 second each blocks). This reliance on averaged data has kept temporal resolution low, and has been an impediment to observing the sequence of activations in the brain in response to stimuli. But recently, several labs have reported good results with event-related designs, which can show the sequence of activations in response to a stimulus. This information is much more useful in understanding networks in the brain, rather than just seeing time-averaged regions that "light up". There are also methods available now (still experimental) which can detect the BOLD response in a single activation. No averaging required.

Higher field strengths also allow the use of nuclei other than hydrogen in fMRI imaging. Typically, sodium imaging is done with a repetition time of 100 milliseconds. Higher field strengths are also useful in hydrogen imaging, where you can image the brain faster (or image a larger volume of brain) than before.

I do agree with the previous posts that point out the huge gap in understanding between observing an fMRI map, no matter how good, and coming to conclusions that could materially help an advertising campaign. We just don't know enough about the brain to be able to image thoughts unambiguously.

I think progress in this field will be rapid. More powerful scanners are coming online at many institutions across the US. There is now a 9.4 Tesla full-body scanner at the University of Illinois. This should allow very fast acquisitions, and also the imaging of metabolically significant nuclei other than hydrogen. fMRI currently looks for regional increases in blood flow which accompany activations, but the ability to image other nuclei will allow fMRI to get much closer to what is happening at the level of the neuron.