It's an excellent introduction, actually some of you may have had an EEG, who's had an EEG
before?
Yes, sometimes the circumstances aren't so positive, but maybe in a research situation
as well.
What about an FMRI?
You've had both, ah, hard times, I mean they're so noisy to be in aren't they, I put my hand
up in a research project once to be in an FMRI, and I really, it was so loud I couldn't really
concentrate on what they were trying to get me to do anyway.
Well look, thank you for that Phil, and let's just come to Shane, and before we proceed
because on the screen over here you'll see we've got Shane rigged up, describe the device
that you're hooked up to and what it's telling us, so then what you'll be able to do is track
Shane's response as we proceed today.
Go for it.
The headset that I'm wearing is made by a company called Emotive, and what you'll see is there's
about 16 different electrodes surrounding my head, and as Phil said, picking up EEG signals.
Now the Emotive company has developed a range of algorithms to make sure that the EEG is
being processed in a certain way, and they've come up, what we're showing here on the screen
is supposedly three measures.
The blue one is supposed to be frustration, has it looking, oh it's peaking, I would suspect
I can report I'm not frustrated, but frustration is also related to heightened anxiety or excitement,
other sorts of descriptions of that sort of emotional.
The red one which is not being picked up because as I'm talking, Phil mentioned the EMG, so
when I'm talking the muscles in my mouth are moving, they're causing a lot of noise in
the EEG signal.
So what's the red one meant to tell us?
It's supposed to be engagement, so how engaged I am, and that's measuring a type of EEG called
beta, which is a type of beta wave which we commonly measure.
The lower one is instantaneous excitement, again it looks like I'm not a very exciting
speaker to myself.
So at the moment Shane, you're very anxious, possibly fearful, more to death and very disengaged.
That's right.
Well welcome.
Thank you.
That's your job folks.
That's right.
But tell us your story, because you run this company in a truth, which is a seductive title,
is that what you're getting at, the inner truth?
Look, I like the name and came up with the name along with my business partner as well,
mainly probably coming from my forensic background and working with the sort of pathological
side of the human behaviour and again using micro expression analysis.
If everyone sees the shall lie to me, I did that sort of training and use that in the
forensic system.
So that's watching the very minute details in a face to see whether someone might be
lying.
Well it's the face as well as the body language, so often people if they're frustrated or angry
they'll do interesting things like squeeze their hand or tap their foot or they'll lean
a certain way, those sorts of things.
So when I got into market research I started to use a lot of that previous forensic work
to actually, when I was facilitating focus groups, figure out if people were actually
comfortable with their responses to what they were saying in response to an ad or a product
or a print or a brand or whatever it was we were testing.
So from there my undergraduate degree in neuroscience led me to look at the opportunity
of using psychophysiological measures such as EEG to help us better understand consumer
responses, both in the space where often people can't articulate why they like something
versus when they can easily identify what they like.
Even when it comes to advertising or pack design we ask somebody how much do you like
that.
In a focus group to say I don't like the colour red or I don't like the print, that doesn't
necessarily help an advertising agency per se.
They're looking for an emotional response to get that sort of understanding.
So that's how it came to be that inner truth is about using both what people say they like
but also using the physiological measures to actually make sure that they're actually
coming together to make sure that the companies I work with are actually creating value for
customers as well as the company themselves and getting that sort of relationship established.
So when I first met you I actually was surprised to find that there was a neuro marketing company
in Australia because it is such a fledgling field isn't it.
So give us a sense of who your clients are, the sorts of questions that they want answered.
Yes.
Well for example a recent study I just did is for a global advertising agency and what
they're trying to understand is the different types of advertising and how engaging that
is.
So for example we all see at the moment on television the, well I say they're annoying
brand power ads where you get, it's like an infomercial basically where someone's on
the screen.
The Martin Grellis, the BAM ones are the most annoying, they're yelling at you and you see
in your face versus something like the Bodes Draft ads where they tell a story and they
engage you and they take you on a bit of a journey about what the brand is trying to
deliver to its customers.
So they're trying to understand well what actually ads are most engaging to consumers
based on that style of advertising because as an advertising agency they're about trying
to create content that consumers want to see, want to engage with which will then help when
they're at that supermarket shelf say okay I've got an option of five, well I really
like that ad so I might consider this product.
I mean you really want to make people feel good ultimately.
Yeah absolutely.
I mean you can engage them but whether or not that translates to actually someone picking
the product off the shelf and buying it's a whole other question isn't it?
That's exactly right because you can imagine even the experiments that we do are in a very
controlled laboratory environment.
I'm a father of three kids, when I'm at the shops I've got seven-year-old twins pulling
me each direction, a three and a half year-old is three and a half year old pulling me in
another direction.
Sometimes it's just oh I don't even know, I'll just grab that and move on just to get
out of the aisle or down.
So even though we're trying to at best predict what's going to be most engaging and get that
purchasing decision, that product on that higher level of a consideration set it's still
it's a laboratory versus real world.
Let's just get a quick intro to the science that you're exploiting so to speak.
What instruments are you using to help your clients?
What we currently use is we use EEG, not this one, it's as you can see it's not necessarily
that reliable.
So you're now still anxious, bored and in fact you look dead, it's like a flat line on a
heart rate.
Someone get up and tickle the man.
So we do use EEG, a different type of recording, you would have seen some of the images on
the net where it would look like an old fashioned style swim cap, so we use that type of EEG
and we use gel, a type of conductive gel in each of the electrode spots in order to ensure
that we're actually capturing good EEG signals as well as in field short eye tracking.
We use eye tracking as well so we can get a good measure of what people are actually
looking at as well as what the brain is actually responding to.
We measure those two together to try to get an understanding of what part of that stimulus
is actually correlated with that brain response.
Are you confident in the science?
I'm confident in the science that we use because we use EEG technology that you would find
in any hospital.
I can't speak for everyone out there but the science we use definitely.
Because we'll come to that no doubt because there's an awful lot of neurohype and some
would say neuro-tosh out there.
Before we come to Peter and let's have Peter on the screen shall we?
It's because you're flat lining and I think that's boring.
I think Peter will look much more interesting.
Hello up there Peter.
Phil, can I come to you first though?
Marketing people, advertising agencies have reached out to technology for decades in fact.
For 30 years they've been reaching out to try and find some new tools, sometimes gimmickery,
to do what they do.
Just explain that trajectory a bit and how we're in a very different era now do you think
with brain scan technologies and I guess higher resolution devices.
I think there's a number of factors that are playing into it because the 1990s were
the decade of the brain and I think there was a lot of media about the brain that reached
mainstream awareness and there's a number of factors that came together at about that
point in time.
One was that in fact that book that I mentioned, Antonio DiMazio's book Descartes' Era was
a hugely read book and his message of that we can't ask people how they make decisions
we need to connect with them in some other way to understand really what people are thinking.
That message really spread through the marketing community, they took that message to heart.
I guess another part of the timeline that's relevant is that a lot of this technology
is only now really becoming available to organisations, marketing research organisations.
So it's come out of the lab, out of the hospital and it's becoming more widely used by companies
such as Shane's whereas it wasn't previously.
Is there an element of, and forgive me boys with their toys, it's easy to be kind of
seduced by a new toy and it's a great looking device that Shane's got on his head but is
it really progressing, I mean what about the good old fashioned ask someone, the focus
group.
And that's the core of the problem, that there's this research from the lab showing us that
when we do focus groups, look there's a lot of very deep and relevant information that
we can gain from focus groups.
There's other research from the neurosciences showing that if you ask someone a question
about why they made a decision, they will give you an answer and they will do their
very very best to give you an honest answer but very often it is just not true.
And it appears that we have systems hardwired into us that fill in the gaps that when subconscious
processing actually results in a certain kind of decision, we literally manufacture an explanation
that makes sense to us about why we made the decisions we did.
And so Michael Kazanega has what he calls the left brain interpreter, which makes sense
of the things we do after we've done them.
And so that tends to, that may come out in the focus group.
So we're less in control of our thoughts than perhaps we think we are.
There's a lot bubbling away beneath the surface that we're not aware of, that's for sure.
Well let's come to our neuroscientist above our heads.
Peter, hello.
Can we hear you?
No we can't.
I didn't think we could.
Can we hear you through the speakers?
Hello.
Ah there you are.
Ah beautiful.
Good to hear your voice.
Can we hear you?
Let's just say.
Yeah.
Okay.
Peter, I've got a question for you.
I mean how, to what extent, what proportion of our cognition, our thinking is unconscious
because this is extraordinary what Shane and Phil are saying is true.
An awful lot is going on in the netherworld of the brain that we really don't know about
or possibly have any control over.
Well I think that it's very hard to put a number on it.
Well I could speculate about numbers.
But there's no question that there's a significant amount of cognitive activity that goes on in the brain
to which we are incapable of assessing that all sorts of things happen without our conscious awareness of it.
If you think about it, if you just walk down the street there's a tremendous amount of computation that goes on
just to organize your balance and your limbs moving appropriately.
And you never think about those sorts of things.
You can think consciously about it.
But that's a tremendous amount of computational effort which goes on.
The term that we use to subconsciously, it's not completely clear what that means in neurological terms.
But certainly there is a lot of activity that goes on in that realm.
And the interesting issue with respect to the kinds of things that we're discussing this evening,
yes it's evening there, is really how much those events affect our decisions.
And this becomes really an important thing to think about.
It's actually kind of a deep philosophical issue and something that is in fact very important to each and every one of us.
The degree to which we are making decisions that are ours, that are authenticated as ours,
or we are making decisions that are affected by the world around us.
The truth of the matter is that every day we make decisions that are some mixture of those two.
I would like to say that all of my decisions are entirely my own, but I'm quite aware that that would be a falsehood.
And now with deeper understanding of the underlying neuroscience,
some inroads are being made into both understanding that underlying neural circuitry and ways of getting at it.
And then we can talk about that as we go along.
Well, Petty, you're interested in the philosophical questions raised by some of these questions,
but you are particularly concerned now with the ethical questions raised by the neurosciences and development in the neurosciences.
So how do you come at this growth in neuromarketing as a neuroscientist and as an ethicist?
Well, so I think that the issue that we grapple with within the field of neuroethics,
we struggle with this issue as much as everybody else, is the degree to which neuromarketing,
even if you put aside the hype, if it's carried to its logical conclusion,
the extent to which it threatens a concept that pretty much everybody understands,
but the philosophers have spent a long time thinking about called autonomy.
And autonomy is literally self-rule, so that's that ability for an individual to make a decision themselves.
Traditionally, there are many models, but the standard model of autonomy would run something like this,
that we have both higher-order beliefs and desires and lower-order desires.
And some of those lower-order desires might be, well, I'm sitting here talking to this audience,
I want to appear intelligent, that would be my higher-order desire,
but in the meantime, I've been having a couple of cups of tea to keep me up,
and so I might actually have to go to the bathroom pretty soon, and that would be a lower-order desire.
And there's a conflict there between my desire to remain in touch with my audience
and my body's desire to eliminate this some ways.
We will permit you to have a toilet break if you're desperate at any point.
No, at the moment, I'm not quite desperate.
So what I decide to do, though, in the end is thought to require the frontal part of my brain,
my prefrontal cortex in particular, to make the decision of what I'm going to do.
So in this particular case, I'm a relatively rational, intact adult with what's called cognitive control,
and so I'm going to sit here and kind of tough it out and talk to you for the next hour.
But it would be possible to tap into those lower-order desires, which are, they're called first-order desires,
and then the higher-order desires are called second-order desires, and make them more urgent.
Of course, they become more urgent as time goes on.
I think the example has been everybody has had that experience.
But the autonomous decision, the really important part of this is that for a decision to be autonomous,
it really needs to be one that my frontal cortex ultimately decides and not some lower-level unconscious desire
feeding into the decision to such a degree that I lose control and somebody else gains control,
and that is a real threat to autonomy.
So you see a future where neuro-marketing might target our unconscious desires in ways that we might not be aware of
or realise or want, but isn't that what marketing people have always been doing?
So there's no question that's what marketing, that's the whole point of marketing,
and that's why there's some tension here in terms of thinking about this.
It's perfectly reasonable for the market, for business, to do whatever they can to sell their products.
Where this becomes a problem though, and it was kind of interesting in Phil's presentation,
is when it moves over into something that we've termed stealth neuro-marketing,
and so stealth neuro-marketing would be where a product is imbued with certain characteristics
that it's hard to imagine forcing you,
but that make the statistical likelihood of your decision being to buy that product so high
that you're likely to buy it, and yet you're completely unable to ever know that that influence has ever been there.
Because it's one thing to make a decision when presented with a range of information,
and even if you're influenced in some way, but if you're not able to know it all,
then you really lose control over the game, and it is a game of sorts,
and we think that that's really where things kind of move into this uncanny valley of being creepy,
where I don't really want somebody else to decide which kind of tomato soup I'm going to buy,
or if I'm going to buy tomato soup at all.
I actually would like that decision to be mine,
and I would like everybody to be able to make the decision for themselves
with all of the appropriate constraints on that business is allowed to do what they're allowed to do,
but this gets into kind of funny territory.
It's woolly territory, isn't it, because to what extent do we...
There are so many influences on why we buy, what we do, what we choose to do every day.
Phil, I think you've got a response. What do you and Shane too,
what do you think of those concerns that Peter has and his colleagues in the sort of neuroethics community
that maybe there's a future where we'll overstep the line and compromise people's autonomy?
Yes, my initial response is I don't think the goal of neuro-marketing or the goal of marketing at all
is about manipulation, as I mentioned earlier.
And the reason for that is, I think, up until about 1950s, perhaps,
organisations focused on efficient production and sales techniques to generate profit,
but after the 1950s there's been a shift in what marketing is all about,
and the idea of the marketing orientation or an organisation that has a marketing orientation
is one that is focused on bringing the effort of the whole organisation together
to meet the needs of customers.
Because in the end, that is what drives the long-term relationship with a customer.
If I manipulate a customer, I may have some short-term benefit if I can do that,
and I think that's questionable about whether I can do that.
But if I manipulate, I get one sale.
But what happens after that is the customer, there's a huge amount of decision-making
that goes after the purchase is made, and that's all about my satisfaction.
Have I gained the benefits that I sought to achieve?
Was my need met?
And all these things go on after the fact.
And if those needs are not met, well, I won't go back.
I will go either to a competitor or some other kind of product.
And so the idea of manipulation and marketing...
The question is, though, obviously sometimes marketing sells as products that we don't need
or want until we're told that we want them.
I think that's probably questionable too.
Is that my cynical take?
But I guess the other point that I want to make is I'm not clear about how neuro-marketing,
specifically neuro-marketing, instills these manipulative features.
Because I think the neuro-marketing that we've talked about today is all about getting a read on people.
It's not about putting something in.
It's about actually understanding how people respond to something.
So any criticisms we could level that we're currently linking with neuro-marketing,
I think we're really just talking about potential criticisms of marketing as a whole.
So it's interesting, though, Shane and Phil.
I mean, you're getting a read on people.
But in this case, you're getting a read on people in a way that tells you something about them
that they perhaps don't even know themselves.
Shane, what do you think about that?
I think Phil started to answer the marketing question.
I think going back to the sort of autonomy I look at more from my old philosophy of the mind days at uni
is it's comparing free will versus determinism.
So do we have free will in our decision-making or is everything determined by external forces?
Now, my influence from moral philosophy is from Locke and Hume.
And their argument was, well, it's a verbal and semantic debate about free will versus determinism.
And it's more around understanding that as human beings, we have this frontal cortex
that allows us to, at any point in time, stop and think about the decisions that we're making.
Now, if we don't have that capability, then we're going to have a different discussion.
And from an ethic standpoint, I think that is an important discussion to have
because we know from neuroscience that not everybody has that capability, such as young children.
My company would never do research on young children.
Some would, though, wouldn't they?
I would suspect that some potentially would.
So you pop the kids in a scanner and see what they respond to.
That's right. And I suppose then we start to touch across the often debate.
Well, it's that state versus personal freedom to make our own decisions
and how much parental control, how much parental responsibility is it over the children
to help them learn to make the right decisions.
As a psychologist, that's what I spend half my clinical practice on is teaching people
on how to make the right decisions when they weren't making the right decisions
based on an inability to understand their own emotional states.
So from a neuro-marketing standpoint, I look at it as Phil said,
I could ask if this was a quasi-focus group, I could ask everyone,
what do you feel the temperature of the room is?
And I'd probably get 100 different answers.
Whereas it'd be just easier for me to use the thermometer to get a more of an accurate measure.
So I'm sort of saying, well, from an EEG perspective, and there are lots of limitations
to what we can actually do with EEG, some of which Phil touched upon
and the differences between MRI and EEG.
We're actually measuring at various parts of the brain
and we can only hypothesize based on the neuroscience theory that this is what's likely to happen.
I would never do a neuro-marketing study and I counsel my clients on this,
on understanding how people use products.
Why would I want to get somebody's brain response on how to use products?
I'd just ask them, you know, if I want to know how they're using a vacuum,
I'll just ask them, you know, or how often.
So there are certain areas which it's highly impractical.
What are you actually measuring?
What's the connection that you're making between what you measure in the EEG
and what you then tell your clients about whether a product's working or not
or whether an ad is working if you're tracking it in time?
So what sorts of brain waves are you picking up on and what does that tell you?
And that always comes back to the objectives of what the study is.
So for example, from an advertising study,
that would be if it's a 15-second ad, 30-second ad, or a minute long ad,
you have to recognize that to run a 60-minute ad on television is exceptionally expensive.
A 60-minute ad?
60 seconds.
I was going to say, shoot.
A 60-second ad.
And it would be tedious.
It's very expensive.
A 60-minute ad, I believe.
But a 60-second ad is very expensive.
So if I can tell them, look, cut 30 seconds out and you're not going to lose your audience,
then that's an important savings for them.
But it's also a saving for consumers.
So what would you be tracking with your EEG and your eye tracking?
We measure two simple measures, just a measure of engagement based on EEG activity.
And that's looking at the whole power spectrum of EEG, different waves,
as well as a positive and negative sort of response.
And that's from an approach sort of withdrawal response we're looking at.
So are we more likely to approach a stimulus or are we more likely to withdraw from that stimulus?
And in fact, that sits in the brain in two different hemispheres quite differently, doesn't it?
That's correct.
So it's kind of a positive association with the left prefrontal cortex, isn't there?
That's right.
And a sort of negative or withdrawing effect on the right side.
That's correct, yes.
So, and that tells you what you think they need to hear?
Yeah, absolutely, because often if what we're finding in our studies say, for example,
if we're a company hired us to do a logo design and 12 different concepts,
you run them through focus groups as you do by the 12th logo,
and I showed this in Phil's lecture last year,
by the 12th logo people are bloody exhausted after looking at 12 logos,
trying to pick what they like this line versus when we actually look at the EEG as well.
When you combine those two things together, what people say they like,
as well as measuring the brain activity,
you can get absolute clarity about which logo is likely to be the best one to go with
and stop wasting thousands and thousands of dollars.
If everyone remembers the, and I love using this one with my clients,
the Veggie Mate 2.0 snack, iSnack 2.0.
Everyone sort of in the public eye thinks that that was probably a very large PR stunt by Kraft,
but I can guarantee the costs involved in something like that are just epic,
and the sales of Veggie Mate would never have covered that.
So cut straight to the chase by cutting to the brain is your idea.
Yeah, absolutely.
Peter Rainer, can we come to you?
What's your take on the science that's being used by neuro-marketing at this point in time?
Is it ripe enough?
Is it ready enough for this sort of exploitation in the market?
Well, actually, to be perfectly honest from the wearing my neuro-ethicist hat,
I'm actually quite pleased with how, to some degree, unripe the science is.
So one thing that I like to tell people is that there's really the kinds of concerns that we have about real stealth neuro-marketing,
that somebody can get in there and control your so precisely.
The science is nowhere near that well-developed.
I think that the insights that come from EEG, which of course is a technology that's been around for many years,
but is enhanced considerably with modern computer analysis that can be applied to these waveforms.
And from FMRI to some limited degree are very, very intriguing.
But really, we're not quite at the fine-grained nuance level that we might want to get to in order to get the deeper insights
that we really want.
But the reality is that people are in the neuro-marketing field have been refining.
And it always surprises me that the neuro-marketing field doesn't discuss this notion of theory of mind much more.
Because when we look at other people, we infer many, many things about their state of mind.
Are they lying? Are they telling the truth? Are they angry? Are they sad?
Did they intend to do this or did they not intend to do this?
And so our brains are very naturally attuned to understand human brains quite well.
And what the neuro-marketing is trying to do is to get at nuance of that.
And I think that it's a valiant effort.
I think that they're going to make a lot of progress.
They're not quite where they may want to be yet, but I have no doubt they'll get there.
Peter, you and your colleagues have written quite extensively, calling for a code of ethics for the neuro-marketing, emerging neuro-marketing industry.
So what would be some of the items in that code of ethics? What would it look like?
And what's the impetus?
Well, so the impetus of having a code of ethics is really the challenge here is one where all of this activity goes on outside of any regulatory framework.
And if one has concerns about any of these issues, you really would like to see actually the industry itself self-regulate or begin to sign on to a code of ethics.
And among the things that are sort of trivial, it seems, but perhaps not entirely so,
private companies, when they go through the kinds of testing that they go through,
they're outside of the umbrella of informed consent.
And so the research subjects that they include in their experiments, at least in North America, I don't know exactly how it works in Australia,
but I'm assuming it's the same sort of thing, that the research subjects aren't required to provide informed consent.
And that has been the standard in human experimental research.
And we think that that's actually a simple and useful thing for companies to do on a routine basis,
to protect their research subjects as we would protect them in any sort of research experiment.
And that's interesting, isn't it? Because certainly in research in universities, that's covering things like,
well, what happens if you have an FMRI or an EEG and something untoward is discovered?
And there's a whole sort of set of protocols around how you would manage that.
Do you tell the person that they've got a brain tumour when all they've come in is to do a fun study, for example?
That's exactly right. And as you know, my colleague, Judy Ellis, has done a lot of work on developing those protocols
for how people in the experimental situation deal with those kinds of incidental findings.
It's not at all clear what would happen if similar discoveries were made in a private company.
Or really, to be perfectly honest, what their responsibility is,
given that they're operating outside of the legal strictures of informed consent that way.
So, I'm interested in your response. So, Shane, how do you feel about a Code of Ethics being developed?
I know there's been a bit of a push in the US to try this for your industry.
Well, look, in Australia, we've got the Australian Market and Social Research Society,
which has a strong Code of Ethics, both covering informed consent.
Any study that my company does, there's two levels of informed consent.
The first stage is at the recruitment phase. So, when the recruitment company calls somebody to participate,
they're explained everything that's going to happen should they wish to participate.
And then when they actually come to the study themselves, they have an information sheet,
which they are forced to actually sit down and read it, as well as sign it that they actually completely understand
what the actual study is about and what's actually going to happen to them.
Probably over the top, and maybe that's my psychologist ethics and principles coming to work,
but our company has those two levels of informed consent, so that's clearly the case.
So, again, you don't have to be a member of the Australian Market and Social Research Society
to be a practicing market research company, so that's an issue in itself.
What's the society keeping up with the neuroscience? I know, certainly, the legal profession, for example,
is facing some of the same challenges. You know, all of a sudden, brain scan evidence is making its way into the courts,
and people are going, oh, my God, what does it mean?
That's right. I don't necessarily think they are. I think I'm trying to petition the society to start to look into it
a bit more to see if there is something that we need to add to the code of ethics and guidelines and practice
for neuromarket research, so we will be looking at that into the future, absolutely.
Phil, what's your take on a code of ethics, and we want you to get your questions and comments ready and rearing to go.
We're going to get a mic roving around in a tick.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely critical. I think it must be done.
As an academic, as you'd be aware, there are very, very rigorous ethical protocols surrounding the research that we do,
whether it's neuroimaging research or purely sitting someone down in front of a computer to do some kind of task,
and I think some of the issues that Peter has raised are critical.
Protecting human subjects, for example, is a critical issue.
I think another one is the fact that people are revealing almost their core being when they're having an MRI or an EEG reading taken.
It's their private self. The inner sanctum.
There is a question about what is done with that data. Is that data protected, and is that data used for any other purposes after the fact?
And I know that one of the interests of large neuro-marketing companies is to build up some kind of database of scans that are collected
that they can use post hoc to achieve some other goal.
So I think we really need to look closely at those kinds of issues.
What about neuro-hype?
Peter, neuro-hype can do both the neurosciences damage, but also the marketing sector damage as well, so I'll get your comments on that.
Peter, what's your take on some of the hype around the neurosciences in different fields?
So this is hopefully becoming a bit of a self-correcting problem, but there has been a great deal of hype that has particularly accrued to the lovely color pictures that come out of fMRIs.
I always like to call them pseudo-color pictures because those colors are actually painted on after the fact.
Those aren't really colors inside your brain.
I mean, our brains don't come as paint by number of objects.
It's very, very lovely and it's very, very compelling to people.
There have been quite a number of studies now where people have been asked whether they found a particular result in the neurosciences plausible with or without those images.
The plausibility factor goes up many fold when the images are there.
So the problem for the neurosciences is really one of developing a bad name for presenting data in the popular press that is probably not quite ready for prime time.
That would be my very polite way of describing it.
And so within the neurosciences, people are really gravely concerned because scientists view themselves as ultimate arbiters of honesty.
And if this hype goes out there, then the overall reputation of scientists diminishes.
And I think there are even some polls that have shown that in the last years that has happened, not specifically neuroscientists.
And I don't know how much the neuro-hype has contributed to that, but it is a real issue.
The other side, of course, is whether the neuro-hype is being sold to businesses from the marketing companies.
And I think that there's less concern.
I think there is a buyer-beware issue and that the businesses should be sophisticated consumers of whatever information they buy.
They might fall into the same sort of traps, but it's less of a concern, certainly at large.
Neuro-hype stands to damage your industry too, doesn't it?
So you've got to tread very carefully, I imagine, about what you take from the neurosciences at what point in time.
Absolutely. And I think from my perspective as an owner of a company that does neuro-market research,
I read so much in the press and what the media reports.
There's always papers coming out of the U.S. of some company purporting, some outrageous sort of findings.
It's the buying spot.
Yeah, absolutely. The buy button is the biggest thing that's right.
And constantly, my clients are asking me, well, can we find X out? Can we find Y out?
And I basically have to say, well, no, you can't. This is what you can do and this is what you cannot do with neuro-market research.
And it's an education process and it comes back to the responsibility of the neuro-market research companies to educate their customers on what they're actually buying.
And I can't speak for every company out there that they're going to do that ethically and with transparency as well.
Having been a forensic psychologist, I guarantee you that they're not.
There are fibbers out there.
There are.
That's right. There are fibbers out there, but not in here, not tonight.
