What taste do you prefer more? Pepsi? Coke? Can you tell the difference between the two or are you choosing based on what your peers like? Or maybe the label? Or do you really honestly and genuinely enjoy one more than the other? How about a singer? Whose song is going to be a #1 hit this year? Scientists started to get curious about the pleasure response in our brains. If people’s brains activated more for one thing than the other could brain scans predict which thing was more popular? They did this experiment using songs. They tested a number of young adolescents in an MRI scanner and started playing a variety of music clips that people downloaded from social networks. While listening to the each song, the intensity of brain activation was measured as well as the subject’s personal rating of the song itself. They then started focusing on the parts of the brain whose activity was correlated with the subject’s likability of the song.
After waiting for years, they separated the songs they played during the scans into songs that became extremely popular, songs that became somewhat popular and songs that just never made it to the radio and then they tried to match it up with the amount of activation they caused a part of the brain. Did brain activation correlate with how popular a song became? The closest area that came close to predicting top hits was the nucleus accumbens although it is not the highest of correlations. I did a little more research on the nucleus accumbens since the experiment in the article stated that the study was not designed to specify how this brain structure did that.
It has been proven with PET scans that our brains activate to music. Anyone who has done a little more extensive research on music effects on brain might also have read that our brain is selective in the type of music we choose to like or dislike (which was what started the idea for the experiment above). Our brain produces the ability to put reward value on music that we enjoy because songs can evoke positive (or negative) feelings. These feelings of emotional responses increases and decreases the blood flow of the cerebrum which harbors our arousal, emotion and motivation systems. Coincidentally the same location where other heavenly feelings and senses are induced, such as food, sex and drugs. Not surprisingly the nucleus accumbens resides in the brain as a key part of the mesolimbic pathway, a system that deals with a particular neurotransmitter..can you guess? ......Dopamine! No surprise there.
If the above experiment did not induce any enthusiasm in you, then I couldn’t agree with you more. The experiment itself, I believe, only proved that we could just predict hit songs just by simply asking someone if they liked the song or not and tallied up what the majority’s favorite. Besides the experiement did mention that they also asked the subjects their own person rating on the song. But the findings of this experiment did spark an idea . The article did mention that the study was indeed a valuable and compelling study in neuromarketing. Maybe the focus should have not been towards songs. Besides there was an array of things that could of skewed the experiment like having a small nonrepresentative sample, picking songs from one source, subject bias..etc.
This same experiment could be reconstructed in a way where a subject’s choice interference such as “wanting to like or dislike a product”, subject bias, picking according to label of product and not actual product itself etc, could be discluded from the experiment. This could be done by placing two different products, into two identical unlabeled containers, having a subject try both and rate which one they like better while doing a scan on the brain. Then at the end of the experiment, they can be given a questionaire in which they can consciously choose which brand name they would prefer. Compare their results. If the results are positively correlated, then competing companies can know that passing out surveys might be just as reliable as the brain scan.
Actually, the reason why this experiment was significant was because large companies want to know if people really do enjoy their product much more than the competing company’s products and many are willing to pay the big bucks to prove this scientifically to the world. Sure, this might not be such great news to most scientists striving to find the cure to Alzheimer’s or anyother neurodegenerative disease, but it is awesome news to the marketing industries and future advertising strategies. In fact big companies, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi are leaning toward techniques such as neuromarketing and neuroeconomics to learn more about the consumer’s brain and how our brain, rather than our spoken opinions, respond to their products. They spend millions of dollars on techniques to make sure that our brain responds to their advantage as indicated in this youtube vid. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swy0jAaECxk Don’t get me wrong, big brand name companies have been using the brain to up their sales for years! Just google : subliminal messaging in advertisments. I just thought it might be interesting to see where all this could lead to in some distant future..imagine a high tech robot with a mini brain scanner in the palm of her hand “You voice that your preference would be a maroon BMW but activity level in your the nucleus accumbens suggest an 80% probability that your actual preference is this silver Mercedes.”
Article can be read here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-scans-predict-pop-hits&page=2
Further research http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693452/pdf/15590614.pdf
Good read. Neuroeconomics is definitely becoming a more influential field in marketing. Another study in neuroeconomics involves equity traders and the brain studies involved with making high-pressured decisions. So how do these two things relate? I'm not really to sure about that but I do have a question -
ReplyDeleteWhere do you think the field of neuroeconomics is going? Reading the article, and even common sense tells me that the large corporations will be the driving factor but could there be any other reasons?
Hey Eric,
ReplyDeleteNeuroeconomics is surely going to grow along with Neuroscience as scientists keep discovering new information on how our brain works. As for where it is going, in my opinion and based on research I have read, I think its going to eliminate personal decision making to an extent. The United States is already an individualistic country as it is, focusing on the self rather than being a small part of a society. Yet our country is constantly influenced by society as a whole. Alot of people will lie or hide their true style, true choice, true opinion, true feelings to blend in with the rest of society. Some people will pick the brand "Coca Cola" over other brands because family or friends prefer the drink and they believe to prefer it too. Neuromarketing scientists realize this so what neuromarketing is striving for is to see what a person "really" prefers by scanning the brain and seeing what activates. (Honestly, I still have not read whether the brain activates because we truly enjoy something vs. activating because we "believe" to enjoy something..but correlation with emotions supports that we honestly enjoy something that gives us happy emotions). Going back to where neuroeconomics is going, if these companies are going to start scanning people's brains and telling people "Your brain activates more for this product than that one" then people might take it as "I should buy the product my brain activates for" because we as humans are more prone to follow the advice of what science tells us versus what a person tells us . People follow what science tells them all the time for example, not drinking coffee because its bad for you and drinking coffee because its good for you. Both of those facts were found in research although they contradict. Neuroeconomics is leaning toward science because science is factual. If society ever came to the extremes of using neuroeconomics in that way, then one of the things that might happen is that people would not focus so much on blending in with society and come to focus on their individual differences. I believe we tend to like our individual differences when people take the time to point them out and praise it at the same time, which is what neuromarketing is aiming for. But then again, it defeats the purpose of free will to an extent, at least who follow the advice of others over their own. Some people will not make the decision because the decision has already been made for them. Especially when the advice comes from professionals like scientists.