Metaphor Marketing...
... let's learn about the brain to sell you pepsi!

     There they go again.......poking noses where they don't belong. It's all lovely and everything but ..hey Doc.....get outta my head!!!.....I don't want any damned nestle crunch bars....  Umm..yeah.....Power to the people....

*sigh* flawed journalism is probably the sole reason that sensationalistic media exists. oh and our need for thrills, entertainment, titillation and one liners of course.

questionable research techniques, potential for 3rd party influence in the results and just silly journalism (that beginning bit about the cradling of the model brain made me cringe) all that aside. what struck me was one of the core points of the article; using these techniques, in the end, to increase consumption of a target product.

hrm.. question�if you want to do experimental research on such things as the workings of the brain with metaphorical imagery and a physical something, then who better to court then large companies who have the advertising budgets of cities and are willing to spend on anything that will make advertising (ie. metaphorical imagery related to a physical something) more effective. (here though you wander off into things like �conflict of interest� and �research intent�)

protagonist, that�s a very good point about the cognitive science line. and the article does contradict itself, a bit further down, �Some customers are visual; others are auditory.�
i do think that research into how the brain functions seems a bit needy for factual models though. (to use a badly simplified statement, yes, science is based on facts, we all know scientific facts change. there�s fluidity there, no matter how hard it�s resisted by the academia) at this point there is not much surety because there is so much contradiction and evolving theories.

one thing dude, you really should have read further. :-P the real kicker and why i placed this article 'Hi-Tech' was the actual �brain scanning� experiments below the chocolate clock section. (while this scanning isn�t new� i think the technique -is- and the intended usage. i�m a bit fuzzy here. i�d like to read up a bit more.)

�With Stephen Kosslyn, a Mind, Brain, Behavior faculty member, Zaltman has begun using positron emission tomography (brain scans) to see how - or more precisely, where - consumers think� they do say it was a one time study. It would be interesting to see where this goes.

i try not to let bad titles prevent me from reading/looking further. i think Pinky here just wanted to add a little humor in his article to illustrate the point about nestle crunch bars and peoples childhoods. silly bugger. and yeah, sex sells, that�s a no brainer. however what exactly about that sex sells �that- particular product might be worth a lot of money to advertising agencies. but back to the nestle bars, in the article the company expressed surprise when it�s product was associated that strongly with time. you bet some former VC student somehwere was revamping an add campagne after that news came in.

*eyes* why would i be offended? i didn�t write the article or make any statement on it. i only posted it, that doesn mean i hold it as the gosple of truth, it means somehting about it struck me of interest. i�m not easy to offend, i�m sure people have found that out by now. and i certainly don�t �get- offended because we might take different things from an article, or woa. i might be wrong. :biggrin: people are way too quick to do that sometimes. but I DO want a cream egg� :( screw all you expensive cream egg owners. i�m buying a ghetto discounted squished egg on tuesday.

happy st. bunny day to �everyone-!

(Edited by Bias at 2:22 pm on April 20, 2003)

i knew -someone- would appreciate that.

*giggles like a pepsi drinking school girl*

*coughs*

oh lordy.

Nah they can't. They can make blind people she different coloured shapes of light, which have a cool name but I forgot what it is.
Bassically what you're asking for is people to have fully mapped the human brain and it's functioning and then to intercept the electro-chemicals signals from one' visual cortex, and applying that to all the other information we must sense from their brain, using probs or the like, as there's pretty much conclusive proof that vision is a two way process, and so just as what you see affects your brain, your brain also affects what you see, which leads to philisophical views of life just being a shared hulicination and that we could just be brains in vats etc. Hmm, that needed some punctuation, ahh well.
Ahh yes I was going to add that before the Newtonian scientific paradym etc, people believed that what they saw was reality, all that there is and so forth. We now know however that bee's see pheromones as illuminous bright colours, and that people don't see the same things either, although it's a subtle difference. Our view of life is no more true than that of the bee, or the rat *grins at Bias*, and the thought before that an atomic view would encompass all reality etc has also been dismissed, as science developes and disproves it's earlier findings. That's a huge tangent though, so I'll stop.
Apart from probing (which can be quite fun as even 50 years ago almost they cut open people's skulls, and proded their brains, making their fingers twitch, etc, like a puperteer), the most advanced unobtrusive method (probing is obstrusive by the way) is an fMRI scan, which is functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where bassically one's brain cells are bombared with radio waves, whose magnetic signature is read in real time (the functional part) as the radio waves reflect off those cells; with the reflection varrying depending on activity mainly but also density etc.
Another equally advanced scaning technique is the SQUID scan, which is a refinement of the PET scan (Positron Emition Tomography, as Bias stated), where a PET scan bassically involves injecting a radioactive isotope into a persons bloodstream, usually in the form of glucose as that is obsorbed by the brain cells (being yummy energy and all), and then the radioactive emisions are read, by a tubular scanner of course (they're all big white tubes generally.), and the most active sites will be giving off the most emisions meaning that we can map what parts of the brain are used in certain cognitive processes etc, by subjecting participants to certian stimuli. This is of course done in real time, otherwise stimuli and brain area mapping could not be achieved.

PET scans are about 20 years old though, with fMRI and and SQUID scans being about 10 years old as far as I know.

*walks off with his PET CAT and SQUID*

*cough*

couldn't help myself.

Oh, one scan that is probably actually the most advanced now is MEG stading fo Magnetoenecephalography, although the spelling might be a little wrong :).