Hi, I think it was Philip mentioned earlier, sorry if I've got it wrong. It's actually
a technological question. You were saying that EEGs are as good as the technology you
will find in a hospital and if you go back from, this is 30 years ago. Just talk on Mike
if you can. Sorry. Yes, start again if you can. I did have an EEG 30 years ago to make
it straightforward. It was for epilepsy and they detect nothing, but I was having lots
of seizures and they said, oh, it's reliable, it's nothing. We just do them in case we see
them occasionally. So I'd really like to know, has the technology massively changed or it
is still as unreliable as it used to be? Well, the technology hasn't changed at all
in terms of the hardware, the tools that are used to pick up the signal. It's actually
quite simple technology. It's essentially a disk that conducts an electrical signal and
wires. What's probably improved is that the software and the analysis routines used to
extract meaning from the signal. So a raw signal picked up from the brain, nobody can
make any sense out of. Perhaps it can tell you how awake or literally asleep or at least
the type someone is. Although not according to our device over here. In fact, I think
it's still, oh no, it's not on your head. It's not on your head. It's cool. No difference.
How bizarre. That's wrong. So the raw signal doesn't have a lot of meaning that we can
extract. So it's all in the analysis that's done after it's collected where the meaning
is actually extracted. And so the software tools that have been used, the software routines
that extract that meaning have probably developed a lot over the years. So could you still make
a mistake? I guess so. Because there are a lot of variables in the mix when you're looking
at an EEG signal. And I'm sure, and obviously it depends upon the kind of issue that we're
talking about. Some signals leap out and grab you and they're very obvious. When someone
blinks their eyes there's an enormous change in the EEG. But you want to subtract that
out, don't you? Exactly. You want to remove that. But the more complex the thinking goes
if you're trying to extract a signal that's linked with decision making, for example,
it becomes more and more difficult to accurately extract that signal. And I think we've still
actually got quite a fair way to go. Any more questions? Oh, here's lots. Okay, where are
we? We're coming over here. Thank you. I'm interested in how you actually recruit for
your focus groups. Because if people are sort of opting in to be part of that focus group,
an argument be made that there's a sort of bias there and therefore are you able to generalise
back to the general population, if that makes sense? I can take that one if you want. Sure,
for Shane. We use a number of ways to recruit people and particularly will again based on
the objectives of the study. So it can sometimes be a very broad sample that we're looking
for. So just a random sample of anyone from 20 up to 50 or it can be very, very narrow.
It could be someone in the 25 to 30 year old category. They're the main grocery buyer in
the house. They will only buy on its biscuits. It really just depends on the actual study
that you do. Do you pay them? I mean, yes, we do pay our participants. Yes. And the recruitment
companies have vast, vast databases of people who want to participate in market research.
I guess what I'm getting at is there's obviously an eagerness there to participate. So are
you really capturing everyone's thinking process? Does that make sense? Yeah, I do understand
what you're saying. And I think from a research perspective and getting a reliable sample,
which is generalizable to the broader community, you know, it's a, and I always bug my statistician
friends. It's, you know, it's a manipulation of the numbers, so to speak, to make sure
that you're getting a reliable and valid sample. Because ultimately, if we want to work out
the fundamental rules behind sampling, we're all our own individual segment. But from a
research perspective, that's not necessarily the most economical way to go and realistic
way to go. So we, we manage that by ensuring that we get a as unbiased sample as we can.
And from an EEG perspective, I think it's important to recognize, and I have to tell
my clients this all the time, they say, well, can we just do one participant? And I say,
well, you could, you're not going to get any information out of that. But, you know, I
am happy for you to, to collect that sort of data because from an EEG perspective, we're
actually grouping those EEG recordings together. So we're not actually looking at one individual
response. We have to average those responses together because, as Phil said, there's such
small signals. We actually have to average them together to actually identify anything
meaningful.
Well, no brain scan is really ever one brain. It's usually a collation of many brains,
isn't it? Another question, I think we had, did we have one just over here? Great.
And upstairs too, we've got Kieran there standing very patiently for you.
I'll try to be quick. Phil and Shane, thank you both for clarifying what the role of
neuro marketing at the moment is. It's, it's ascertaining what people want, not telling
them what they want. I find from a public policy perspective, the interest in the, in
the ethical perspective, and pity you might wish to comment on this, how this technology
and this practice applies to broader questions. And I'm thinking about the obesity problem
that we have in the Western world. And we already know that many companies are very
sophisticated in marketing, manufactured food to people who, and this, this technology and
how it could be applied in an already troubling, some people might say, area of marketing.
So it goes to your point, Phil, about, maybe we're talking about marketing more broadly,
but the ethics question for me comes with the intersection of this technology.
Yep. I've got a response, perhaps one thing I'd like to say.
Phil, did, just to check, did you hear that film?
Peter.
Peter, I mean, sorry.
I did, yeah.
Yeah, good, just checking. Phil.
I'll, I'll just jump in because some of my research actually directly connects with
some of those points. So in our research, for example, one of the tasks that we're interested
in is this choice between an impulsive decision versus self, self control. And we play that
off in this task, asking people, do you want money now or more money later on? And it pits
those two forces against each other. And it's exactly that kind of interplay between impulsivity
and self control, which plays into the obesity issue, all manner of issues of addiction,
for example. And what we hope to do is use imaging techniques to better understand those
forces, literally at the neural level, to help us literally break down that, that mechanism
of decision making so we can understand it better and do something about it.
Yeah.
Peter, you might have a comment there. I know you've just written a really interesting paper
on, on addiction and neuroscience.
Yeah. So I think that actually this is one area where work in the general field that
gets called neural marketing, but is really the neuroscience of decision making is, is
on the, it certainly has the potential to be a real boon to society at large because it,
believe it or not, many of the decisions we make are, are not very good decisions. And
a lot of the, in fact, a lot of the
No, surely not.
that we have, obesity being the most obvious one, addiction being another issue, addiction
writ large, if you will, are ones that we bring upon ourselves by making poor decisions.
And we make them because of the environment in which we live, which biases us towards
those decisions. And as we further our understanding of the neural underpinnings of decision making
and all the different factors that go into it, which certainly the new marketers want
to understand, we also have the opportunity to actually help people make better decisions.
And there's a couple of ways of thinking about this. Probably the most famous one right
now is this, this, there's a book called nudge. I don't know whether that, that has been marketed
heavily down in Australia, but it's certainly been very popular in North America. And it's
this notion of choice architecture that sometimes just the way that choices are presented to
us lead us to make one choice versus another. And they coined this term of a, a form of,
well, I won't get into it too much, but a form of soft paternalism where they try to
set up the decision making architecture such that people tend to make the better decision
rather than the worst decision. And as we understand how these processes go, I think
it will be in a better position to actually be able to help people, which would be a great
thing.
Yes, you could really see some of these neuro marketing principles being employed to target
public health campaigns. And so there's actually a whole interesting flip side that is nothing
to do with commercial realities, isn't there? Another question. Yes, we're making Brian
work tonight. We need to have you on a hoist.
Thank you. I was interested in something that Phil said early on about when people suffer
particular types of brain damage that kind of knock out the emotional component in decision
making and that they actually make worse decisions. And I was just interested to hear more about
that, whether it's understood why and in what direction those decisions are worse, because
that emotional component is obviously an area in which we're particularly vulnerable to
potential manipulation.
Sure. So, Peter's alluded to this to a certain extent. So there are some areas in the brain,
up in extreme frontal areas of the brain, which appear to help us learn from our experience.
When we experience a certain scenario or certain series of events, the emotional response that
we have when we encounter those events gets linked with that memory. And this region of
the brain actually brings those emotional memories back the next time we encounter a
similar set of events. And so when we lose the ability to bring that emotional colour
into our decision making, we lose the benefit of our experience. So the emotional response
we had last time around gets lost, and so we can tend to repeat the same mistakes repeatedly.
And there's a classic case study that every neuroscience student learns in first year
neuroscience about a guy called Phineas Gage back in the 1800s. And he was a railway worker
who actually was charged with tamping down the explosives with a very long metal spike,
about six foot long or so. And the explosion went off and drove the spike through his eyeball,
up through the front of his brain, and at the other side, and the heat of the explosion
actually cauterised the wound. And so he lived. He had a hole through the front part of his
brain and a hole at the top, but he lived. He had a bit of a personality change though,
didn't he? He had an extreme personality change. And this is the point that Phineas Gage and
his doctor noted his recovery and quite extensive notes about this case study. And Phineas's
IQ didn't change. So his ability to bring cognitive processing, the bear, in his decision
making was fully intact. He lost the ability to bring the emotional colour into his decisions
and his life gradually fell apart. As you can imagine, you don't get a steel rod through
the head every day, do you? And we have one in the middle here. Oh, one just here. Oh,
over here. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Brian. Two in the middle. I'm talking to Peter in
Canada. Peter mentioned self-regulation. I don't think it would work. We haven't got
a code of ethics or a code of practice or anything like that yet. I think that this
industry is developing faster than anybody's, bothering to get a code of ethics into place
so that if self-regulation did work, they'd have something to work with. Once upon a time
in South Australia, we had prescriptive legislation in the health and safety field, 1995, that
was abolished and the duty of care was placed on the owners and employers. It hasn't worked
very well. And this industry is developing quicker than we can get standards and other
things to do. It's not just this industry. There's a lot of industry that regulators
can't keep up with. Thank you. That's it. What's the panel got to say about that?
Yeah, perhaps I could make one comment. I believe today or tomorrow at the Advertising
Research Foundation Conference in New York, there's been a report being released which
is the industry, if we can call it that, it's not really an industry yet, a fledgling industry's
attempts to set up some standards. And so that report I think is literally being launched
as we speak. So there is some attempt being made by the industry to come up with some
standards. We don't know what that report says yet, but I think there's-
And whether it'll cover all jurisdictions. Exactly. But there is at least some attempt
being made to self-regulate. Yeah.
Peter. Yeah, if I could come. And I have to agree with
the questioner that self-regulation is problematic and I don't think anybody has to look very
much further than the 2008 financial crisis to see how self-regulation can end up resulting
in outcomes that are less than desirable. But really what we're calling for by suggesting
that there should be some self-regulation by industry is a step forward from where we
are now. And right now it's really wide open in terms of each individual firm has the opportunity
to pursue whatever path it decides to pursue all on it. So if they begin to self-regulate,
that's probably in their best interest because eventually there'll be some problem and some
blow-up and then there'll be external regulation. The other thing is that as neuro-ethicists,
we like to mention often that we're not the police. We don't really like to take the
role of the police. It's not so much that we want to say no, but what we want to do
is we want to just point out some issues that society needs to pay attention to that are
relevant to society with advances in the neurosciences and then allow various processes to come to
play on bringing them into alignment with society's goals.
Okay, we've got just a few more minutes left and I think what I'll do is we'll whip around
and get a few questions in a row and then we'll get the panel to respond to them, shall
we? So we can get as much in as we can in the last five minutes.
I just had one online question. We're getting this whole thing live-streamed at the moment.
So during Shane's presentation, using by the name of Veg, I wonder if deep subconscious
memory comes into play in neuro-marketing. Okay, we'll hold that one. Next question.
Can you remember them? Just in the context of this series, I, the
seven deadly sins, this is with regards to envy. Surely there is an element of that and
the bypassing of conscious thought of I want that product. I don't want that product. When
you look at things like celebrity endorsement, surely that is an overt manipulation of people
to say you buy this, you'll gain the same qualities I have, whoever that is on the
page. Okay, hold that thought. And have we got another
one? We'll do it in threes. Yes, no, we'll cover those two and we'll come back. So deep
subconscious memory, does that come into play from Veg online?
Well, I think that goes to sort of what Phil was talking about in terms of understanding
how experience comes into play with our emotional decision. You've got to understand and as
Phil rightly pointed out, EEG is recording activity on the outer part of the brain. Some
of those areas are linked to some memory, but when we're looking at deep subconscious
memory, we're talking about the hippocampus, which is a structure deep within the brain.
And an EEG does not necessarily record the theta activity that the hippocampus responds.
MRI, different story. And even the concept of deep subconscious
memory is a little bit wooly, I have to say. I mean, long-term memories are stored in the
exterior surfaces of the brain. That's right. In terms of what's more important is actually
trying to get an understanding of what the experience is for consumers and ensuring that
the companies are still continuing to offer that experience for that individual.
And a question in the middle about the celebrity endorsement and overt marketing.
I'll respond to that one as well, because my sister company in the U.S. has actually
done research with celebrity endorsements to identify whether or not they actually work.
They drive me nuts. And it goes to the whole sponsorship type
market research area as well, which in my opinion is not particularly good. But the
research that SANS research conducted overseas clearly showed that celebrity endorsements
don't actually work and that there was no benefit to the actual products being endorsed
by the individuals. So those 60-minute, actually 60-minute ads
overnight, those infotainment ads with celebrities. That's right.
Perfect skin, you know. The interesting thing is with envy, it typically
needs to be against a similar other. We don't tend to envy people who are in a different
class. Or maybe we do envy people who are in a different class. But envy is very much
linked with someone I can compare to myself that has more than I do. And in my limited
poking around looking for neuroimaging studies that looked at envy in preparation for tonight,
I saw that there seems to be two brain regions that fire. And one is this reward system where
we see someone that has something that we're envious of. And the other, and this is doing
a lot of what we call reverse inference, but another region in the brain called the anterior
singular, which tends to fire when there's a conflict, then there's a problem that needs
resolving or some kind of conflict that fires as well, apparently, in envy states. So we're
seeing a reward and there's some kind of conflict between perhaps what we think we should have
and what someone else has. But we've got to be careful of those kinds of interpretations.
Yes, indeed. A final question? Yes, thanks. Oh, Peter.
Can I just make one quick comment on that? That's kind of an interesting aspect of how
reward is now understood is that it's not so much that an item is rewarding in and of
itself, but that the modern view of it is that it has to do with what our expectation
is. So if you're expecting something to be rewarding and then it falls short, that's
very much more disappointing than had you not been expecting it in the first place. And
in the same sort of way, something that is a surprise reward is much, much more rewarding
than the same sort of reward when you're expecting it to be there. And so the celebrity endorsements,
of course, what they, I think where they, the way that they work to the extent that
they work is that they change our expectations. And actually, I think the reason that they
don't work is because we're disappointed when we find out that we're not those beautiful
models with that perfect smooth skin and those idealized bodies, but that we actually live
in the real world. Perfect skin, idealized bodies, and unhappy
lives, perhaps, I don't know. Can we give Peter Reiner a really big thank you because
it is, we're very grateful, Peter, for your time. It is getting on for probably two AM
or two 30 AM and you are busting to go to the toilet. So thank you for being with us
from Canada. They're in Vancouver. We're very grateful.
Thank you. And to Shane Moon, Dr. Shane Moon, thank
you. All the way from Sonny Melbourne and also all the way from Sonny Melbourne to Phil
Harris. Thank you, Dr. Phil Harris. Thank you. And to all of you from Sonny Adelaide.
Thank you very much for being here. Now, next Wednesday is the last in the series, the RIOs
series of Seven Deadly Sins. It's taking on sloth. Fantastic. Hope you're there. I think
it's the book club night, isn't it? Also, we have questionnaires. This sort of stuff,
this piece of paper, it's a bit of marketing, I guess, is what keeps institutions like this
alive. We urge you to fill it out so that you get the best events you possibly can.
And thank you very much. Bits of this will be pulled together to be broadcast on All
in the Mind on Radio National this Saturday, repeated on Monday at 1. Enjoy. Have a lovely
night. Enjoy your dinner. Thank you.
