Paul D. Miller on Mon, 9 Jan 2006 16:10:22 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Brands and Identity in the Age of Neuroscience |
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8535&feedId=online-news_rss20 How brands get wired into the brain 18:31 04 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Shaoni Bhattacharya A person's liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack. It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov's dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain - the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain - as having an important role in this learning. But now work led by John O. Doherty, currently at Caltech in Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded in these brain regions, and that people access this information to guide their decisions. The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves, says Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK. This is because we can make use of our prior experiences of the items through which we fashioned subjective preferences - do I like it or not? he told New Scientist. The next time we come to make a decision we use those preferences. Pavlovian conditioning Doherty and colleagues at UCL and the University of Iowa, US, ranked the preferences of human volunteers for blackcurrant, melon, grapefruit and carrot juice, and for a tasteless, odourless control drink. The researchers scanned the volunteers brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect enhanced blood flow in various brain regions the greater the flow, the greater the neural activity in those areas. They developed a Pavlovian-type association by flashing a geometric shape on a computer screen and giving a squirt of juice into the volunteers's mouths. However, the volunteers did not realise that they were being conditioned in this way they were simply told to press a button to indicate on which side of the screen the shape had appeared. The team measured how the volunteers had become conditioned by measuring their anticipation of the juice squirts following an image by measuring the dilation of their pupils. Fast food poisoning The fMRI scans revealed significant responses reflecting learning in the ventral midbrain and the ventral striatum. Crucially, they found that the strength of the response correlated with the volunteer's like or dislike of the juice. "Stronger neural responses occur in these regions to a cue that is associated with a more preferred food" said Doherty. This shows that when you see a cue that is predictive of a reward, you are able to access information about your subjective preferences. Doherty says this kind of brain programming may have an evolutionary function in helping humans and animals predict both good and bad experiences in their environment. For instance, if you learn that a particular fast food outlet gave you food poisoning the last time you ate there it is going to be in your interest to know not to go there again once you see the sign for that shop in the street he says. Journal reference: Neuron (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.11.014) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net