They hacked your brain

INTEL, PAYPAL, PEPSICO, GOOGLE,
HP, GITI, AND MICROSOFT ARE
SPENDING MILLIONS TO PLUMB YOUR
MIND. HERE'S HOW IT'S DONE.
By Adam L. Penenberg
Photograph by Gene Lee
SEPTEMBER 2011 FASTCOMPANV.COM 85
K. Pradeep knows what you
like and why you like it. Take
the sleek, slick iPad. Ask Mac
lovers why they adore their
tablet and they'll say it's the
convenience, the touch screen,
the design, the versatility But
Apple aficionados don't just
like their iPads; they're preprogammed
to like them. It's in
their subconscious—the curves,
the way it feels in their hands, and in the hormones
their brains secrete when they touch the
screen. "When you move an icon on the iPad
and it does what you thought it would do, you're
surprised and delighted it actually happened,"
he says. "That surprise and delight turns into a
dopamine squirt, and you don't even know why
you liked it."
Pradeep is the founder and CEO of sciencebased
consumer-research firm NeuroFocus, a
Berkeley, California-based company wholly
owned by Nielsen Research that claims to have
the tools to tap into your brain (or, as Woody
Allen called it, "my second favorite organ"). You
might say Pradeep was born to plumb
the depths of our minds. The "A.K." in his name
stands for Anantha Krishnan, which translates
as "unending consciousness"; Pradeep means
86 FASTC0MPANY.COM SEPTEMBER 2011 PHOTOGRAPH BY FLOTO + WARNER
NeuroFocusCEO
A.K.Pradeep thinks
that traditional
focus groups are a
Cro-IMagnon form
of market research.
"illumination." Fortunately, he doesn't refer to
himself as Unending Illuminated Consciousness,
preferring, as is custom in his native region
of India, a single name: Pradeep. "Like Prince
or Madonna," he explains.
On this particular spring day, he's in New York
to offer a presentation at the 75th Advertising
Research Foundation conference. As he holds
court on a small stage in a ballroom of the Marriott
Marquis in Midtown, Pradeep seems to
relish the spotlight Swizzle-stick thin and topped
with unruly jet-black hair, the effusive 48-yearold
is sharply dressed, from his spectacles to his
black jacket and red-and-black silk shirt, and all
the way down to his shiny boots. He stands out,
needless to say, from the collective geekdom
gathered at this egghead advertising fest.
Speaking with the speed and percussive
enunciation of an auctioneer, Pradeep is at the
conference today to introduce his company's
latest innovation: a product called Mynd, the
world's first portable, wireless electroencephaones
whose packaging and labels are dreary
tumoffs), the characters in a Hollywood film that
engender the strongest emotional attachments,
and the exact second viewers tune out an ad.
Pradeep and his team in Berkeley are hardly
the first to make a direct connection between
brain ñjnction and how it determines consumer
behavior. Advertisers, marketers, and product
developers have deployed social psychology
for decades to i nfluence whether you buy Coke
or Pepsi, or a small or an extra-large popcorn.
Like the featherweight ofthat mobile phone?
Suddenly gravitating to a new kind of beer at
the store? Inexplicably craving a bag of Cheetos?
From eye-deceiving design to product-placement
gimmickry, advertisers and marketers have
long exploited our basic human patterns, the
ones that are as rudimentary and predictable
as Pavlov's slobbering dog.
NeuroFocus, however, promises something
deeper, with unprecedented access into the nooks
and crannies of the subconscious. It's a tantaliz-
These corporations share the same goal:
to mine your brain so they can blow your mind
with products you deeply desire.
logram (EEG) scanner. The skullcap-size device
sports dozens of sensors that rest on a subject's
head like a crown of thorns. It covers the entire
area of the brain, he explains, so it can comprehensively
capture synaptic waves; but unlike
previous models, it doesn't require messy gel.
What's more, users can capture, amplify, and
instantaneously dispatch a subject's brain waves
in real time, via Bluetooth, to another device—a
remote laptop, say, an iPhone, or that muchbeloved
iPad. Over the coming months, Neuro-
Focus plans to give away Mynds to home
panelists across the country Consumers will be
paid to wear them while they watch TV, head to
movie theaters, or shop at the mall. The firm will
collect the resulting streams of data and use
them to analyze the participants' deep subconscious
responses to the commercials, products,
brands, and messages of its clients. NeuroFocus
data crunchers can then identify the products
and brands that are the most appealing (and the
ing claim, given that businesses spend trillions
of dollars each year on advertising, marketing,
and product R&D, and see, by some estimates,
80% of all their new products fail. The hope that
neuroscience can provide more accurate results
than traditional focus groups and other traditional
market research is why Citi, Google, HR
and Microsoft, as well as soda companies, brewers,
retailers, manufacturers, and media companies
have all become NeuroFocus clients in the
past six years. When salty-snack purveyor Frito-
Lay looked to increase sales of its single-serve
lOO-calorie snacks to women, it tapped Neuro-
Focus, whose research informed new packaging
and a new ad campaign. CBS partnered with the
firm to measure responses to new shows and TV
pilots; Arts & Entertainment (A&E) had Neuro-
Focus track viewers' second-by-second neurological
reactions to commercials to ensure that
its programs work with the ads that fund them;
and Pradeep's team helped ESPN display the logos
SEPTEMBER 2011 FASTC0MPANY.COM 87
^
BRAIN EATERS
Companies try to keep their neuronarketing efforts
seoret, Here are six that we flushed out.
of its coqx)rate advertisers more effectively on-air.
California Olive Ranch had NeuroFocus test its
olive-oil labels for maximum appeal. And, as v^re'll
see later, Intel hired the company to hetter understand
its global branding proposition, while
PayPal sought a more refined corporate identity.
These corporations vary widely, but they share
a fundamental goal: to mine your brain so they
can blow your mind with products you deeply
desire. With NeuroFocus's help, they think they
can know you better than you know yourself.
Orange cheese dust. That wholly unnatural
neon stuff that gloms onto your fingers when
you're mindlessly snacking on chips or doodles.
The stuff you don't think about until you realize
you've smeared it on your shirt or couch cushions—
and then keep on eating anyway, despite
your better intentions.
Orange cheese dust is probably not the first
thing you think of when talking about how the
brain functions, but it's exactly the kind ofthing
that makes NeuroFocus, and neuromarketing
in general, such a potentially huge and growing
business. In 2008, Frito-Lay hired NeuroFocus
to look into Cheetos, the junk-food staple. After
scanning the brains of a carefully chosen group
of consumers, the NeuroFocus team discovered
that the icky coating triggers an unusually powerful
response in the brain: a sense of giddy
subversion that consumers enjoy over the
messiness of the product. In other words, the
sticky stuff is what makes those snacks such a
sticky brand. Frito-Lay leveraged that information
into its advertising campaign for Cheetos,
which has made the most of the mess. For its
efforts, NeuroFocus earned a Grand Ogilvy award
for advertising research, given out by the Advertising
Research Foundation, for "demonstrating
the most successful use of research in the
creation of superior advertising that achieves a
critical business objective."
This seemingly precise way of unveiling the
brain's inner secrets is the ultimate promise of
neuromarketing, a science (or perhaps an art)
that picks up electrical signals from the brain
and spins them through software to analyze
the responses and translate those signals into
layman's terms. While evolving in tandem with
advances in neuroscience, the field owes much
to a study conducted at the Baylor College of
Medicine in 2004 to investigate the power of
brand perception on consumer taste preferences.
Based on the famous Coke vs. Pepsi tests
of yesteryear, volunteers had their brains
scanned in an MRI as they sampled each beverage.
When they didn't know what they were
drinking, half liked Coke and half liked Pepsi.
When they did know, however, most preferred
Coke, and their brain scans showed a great deal
of activity in the cranial areas associated with
memory and emotion. In other words, the power
of Coke's brand is so great that it preps your
brain to enjoy its flavor—and presumably to
influence your purchasing decisions when
you're in the supermarket.
Since the Baylor study, neurotesters have
turned to the EEG as their standard measurement
tool, rather than the MRI. For starters, the
MRI is bulkier, harder to administer, and expensive.
Far more important, however, is the
fact that an EEG measures the brain's electrical
activity on the scalp, while an MRI records
changes in blood flow inside the brain. This
means that an EEG reading can be done almost
in real time, while an MRI's has a five-second
delay MRIs provide beautiful, high-resolution
pictures, ideal for identifying tumors and other
abnormalities, but they are useless for tracking
quick-hit reactions.
For example, imagine that you are asked to
generate an action verb in response to the word
ball. Within 200 milliseconds, your brain has
absorbed the request. Impulses move to the
motor cortex and drive your articulators to respond,
and you might say "throw." This process
happens far too fast for an MRI to record. But
an EEG can capture virtually every neurological
impulse that results from that single word: ball.
This is where modern neuromarketing
exists—at the very creation of an unconscious
idea, in the wisp of time between the instant
your brain receives a stimulus and subconsciously
reacts. There, data are unfiltered, uncorrupted
by your conscious mind, which hasn't
yet had the chance to formulate and deliver a
88 FASTC0MPANY.COM SEPTEMBER 2011 ILLUSTRATION BY SUPEREXPRESSO
response in words or gestures. During this vital
half second, your subconscious mind is free
from cultural bias, differences in language and
education, and memories. Whatever happens
there is neurologically pure, unlike when your
conscious mind takes over and actually changes
the data by putting them through myriad mental
mechanisms. It's all the action inside you
before your conscious mind does the societally
responsible thing and reminds you that artificially
flavored and colored cheese dust laced
with monosodium glutamate is, well, gross.
With the instantaneous readings of EEG
sensors, neuromarketers can track electrical
waves as they relate to emotion, memory, and
attention from specific areas of the brain:
namely, the amygdala, an almond-shaped region
that plays a role in storing emotionally
charged memories and helps trigger physical
reactions (sweaty palms, a faster heartbeat);
the hippocampus, where memory lurks; and
the lateral prefrontal cortex, which governs
high-level cognitive powers (one being attention).
Once the brain waves are collected, complex
algorithms can sift through the data to
connect each reaction to a specific moment.
Neuromarketers like Pradeep argue that this
testing is much more efficient, cost effective,
and precise than traditional methods like focus
groups. While Gallup must poll roughly a thousand
people to achieve a 4% margin of error,
NeuroFocus tests just two dozen subjects for its
corporate clients—and even that is a sample
size larger than those deployed by leading academic
neuroscience labs. This is possible because
people's brains are remarkably alike, even
though there are some differences between
male and female brains, and between those of
children and senior citizens. And NeuroFocus
collects a massive amount of input, recording
and analyzing billions of data points during a
typical neurological testing project. This is the
genius of neuromarketing, according to a
booster like Pradeep. He promises an accurate
read of the subconscious mind. Focus groups
and surveys, on the other hand, give an imprecise
measure of the conscious mind, of so-called
articulated, or self-reported, responses. They
are one step removed from actual emotion,
inherently weak: like flashbacks in a film. They
are fine for eliciting facts, less so for probing
into what people really feel.
Not everyone agrees that neuromarketing
is the next great thing, of course. Because its
research has been primarily corporate funded
and its tangible results primarily anecdotal,
neuromarketing is not without detractors, who
tend to lump it in with the array of businesses,
like biometrics or facial mapping, that promise
all sorts of new-wave marketing breakthroughs.
Ray Poynter, founder of the Future Place, a
social-media consultancy in Nottingham, England,
colors himself a skeptic on all of them
but saves his harshest criticism for neuromarketers.
He believes they offer far more hype
than science. "Neuromarketers are overclaiming
massively," he says. "While it is likely to
reduce the number of bad mistakes, and
slightly increase the chance of good things
happening, it's all a matter of degree."
Even so, it's hard to imagine neuromarketing
proving less reliable than traditional market
research. For decades, marketers have relied on
focus groups and surveys to divine what consumers
want, using these methods to solicit
feedback on their attitudes, beliefs, opinions,
and perceptions about an advertisement, a product
and its packaging, or a service. Each year.
groups wondering whether to go hunt mastodon
that night," Pradeep says. "Today, our focus
groups are no different." In the tale of our inner
lives, we have always been unreliable narrators.
Pradeep believes he can get at the truth.
When David Ginsberg joined Intei in 2009 as
the company's director of insights and market
research, he was something of an expert on the
slippery nature of "truth," having spent 15 years
working on political campaigns for John Edwards,
lohn Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton.
Ginsberg was downright skeptical of neuromarketing,
or, as he calls it, "nonconsciousbased
research." He thought it had more to do
with science fiction than reality. But he also
knew that Intel had been conducting market
research as if it were still 1965, with surveys
that were the equivalent of sending Gallup off
to knock on thousands of doors. That may have
worked decently in the days when a person
bought a computer based on specs—processing
speed, RAM, etc. But in an age where virtually
every computer is sold with power to spare,
Ginsberg knew that the rationale for buying a
certain computer was as much emotional as it
was rational. To compete in this new market,
Intel the company had to understand how peo-
Ray Poynter of the Future Place saves
his harshest criticism for neuromarketers:
• "They are overclaiming massively."
hundreds of thousands of focus groups are organized
around the world, and about $4.5 billion
is spent globally on qualitative market research.
This kind of "mother-in-law research," as ad
exec Kirk Cheyfitz calls it, has all manner of
shortcomings. It's not statistically significant,
so it's risky to graft your findings onto the population
at large. One or two blowhards may hijack
an entire panel, and researchers can, without
knowing it, influence participants. The world
has changed, and yet so much market research
is still conducted the same old way.
"I bet you, long ago if you looked at cave
paintings, there were a bunch of Cro-Magnon
men and women sitting around a fire in focus
pie felt about Intel the brand.
"If you ask people if they know Intel, something
like 90% will say they know Intel,"
Ginsberg says. "Ask if they like Intel, a huge
percentage will say they like Intel. Ask them [to
rank or name) tech leaders, however, and we
come out much lower on the list." Ginsberg felt
that he needed to understand consumers'
feelings at a deeper level: What words did consumers
associate with Intel? Were these associations
altered by one's culture? Ginsberg
decided to run pilot tests with a number of
market-research firms, and despite his sense
of neuromarketing as mumbo jumbo, he incontinued
on page 123
SEPTEMBER 2011 FASTC0MPANY.COM 89
Neuromarketing
continued from page 89
eluded NeuroFocus. What he learned surprised
him and turned him into a believer.
NeuroFocus structured its test for Intel as it
does most of its market research, patterning it
after something called the Evoked Response
Potential test, a staple of neuroscience. Test subjects
were paid to come to a NeuroFocus lab and
put on a cap with 64 sensors that would measure
electrical activity across the brain. Because the
U.S. and China are two very important markets
for Intel, NeuroFocus tested groups of 24 consumers
(half men, half women) in Berkeley and
in a midsize city in China's Sichuan Province.
In a quiet room, each test subject was shown
the words "achieve," "possibilities," "explore,"
"opportunity," "potentiality," "identify," "discover,"
"resolves," and "solves problecns." Each
flitted by on aTV screen at half-second intervals.
The subject was instructed to press a button
whenever she saw a word with a letter underscored
by a red dot. After several minutes of
this subconscious-priming word test, she was
shown a few Intel ads. Following this, the words
were again presented on the screen, this time
without the dots.
The exercise served two functions: First, the
red dots focused the subject's attention; second,
they gave NeuroFocus a baseline measure of
the brain's response, since each time a test
subject saw the red dot, her brain went "A-ha!
There's a word with a red dot." Click.
When NeuroFocus later analyzed the EEG
readings, it looked for those same "a-ha" moments
from the period during which the subject
had viewed the Intel ads. The words that
provoked the most such responses were
"achieve" and "opportunity." Interestingly,
women in the U.S. and in China had virtually
the same response post-advertisements, as did
American men and Chinese men. The differences
were in the genders; on both sides of the
pond, men and women had strikingly different
reactions. "Achieve" prompted the most intense
reaction among women, while men gravitated
toward "opportunity "
Says Ginsberg: "This was incredibly fascinating
to us. There seem to be fundamental values
across humanity" He believes that Intel would
have never learned this through traditional market
research and focus groups, where cultural
biases come into play He also concluded that
there are differences in how men and women
think, and that these differences cross cultural
boundaries. This is not news to Pradeep, who
points out that male and female brains are different,
and not in a Larry Summers women-aren'tas-
good-at-math-and-science-as-men-arekind
of way The female brain is our default brain when
we are in the womb. But at week eight, about half
of all fetuses are bathed in testosterone. These
now-male brains close down certain communication
centers in the brain while opening up
others geared toward sex and aggression. In female
brains, meanwhile, the communication
Almost every time he asked a PayPal employee,
"What's the big idea behind PayPal?" the following
response came back: "Safe, simple, wow!"
"Safe, simple, wow?" Herstein scoffs. "That's
not a big idea. It's a tagline." It didn't even make
sense. Wasn't any payment product supposed
to be safe and simple? He supposed that software
engineers might know that paying for things
was complicated, but having worked at American
Express and Citi, he knew that the consumer
didn't think that was the case. And "wow"? He
cringed. Then, after a series of brainstorming
sessions and conversations with a broad range
of customers, he hired NeuroFocus to help him
figure out the basic concepts around which he
could build a new global identity for PayPal.
As part of its standard methodology, Neuro-
Focus captures the subconscious resonance
"The mystique is that there's a way to turn
consumers into robots to buy products. That's
simply not the case/' says one neuromarketer.
pathways continue to evolve, intricate neural
routes are constructed across both hemispheres,
and areas dedicated to emotion blossom. Life
seems to imitate a beer commercial, doesn't it?
Now Intel is changing its marketing strategy
"A brand that helps people achieve and offers
opportunity has a phenomenal brand attribute,"
Ginsberg says. "It gives you a new perspective
on things, to understand your consumer better."
The NeuroFocus findings have informed the
next round of creative advertising you'll see
from Intel, due to emerge later this year. "I guarantee
when you see these ads you'll see a straight
line," Ginsberg adds. "The study gave us fresh
insights to talk about things we didn't have permission
to talk about before."
It is conceivable that Intel could have redirected
its advertising toward achievement and opportunity
with the help of focus groups. But Ginsberg
feels, and Pradeep fervently believes, that
neuromarketing has a much better shot at getting
closer to the unconscious truth, and therefore
proving more effective. Still, the difference
between the two forms of research sometimes
seems to be just a matter of degrees.
Barry Herstein left American Express to
join PayPal in October 2007 as global chief
marketing officer with the goal of giving eBay's
transaction-processing division a coherent
marketing strategy After the first few weeks,
he knew just how difficult the task would be:
consumers have for seven brand attributes: form,
function, and benefits, as well as feelings (the
emotional connection a brand elicits from consumers),
values (what it represents), metaphors
(aspirations, challenges, lessons, or life events
that seem connected to the product), and extensions
(the unexpected and perhaps illogical feelings
it inspires). Based on his earlier brainstorming
sessions, Herstein asked NeuroFocus to home
in on three attributes and create three phrases
for testing within each. For function he offered
"convenient," "fast," and "secure"; for feelings,
"confident," "hassle-free," and "in the know";
and for benefits, "new opportunity" "on my side,"
and "empowering." The 21-person panel had 11
men and 10 women and was also segmented
into regular, light, and non-PayPal shoppers.
According to NeuroFocus, "fast" ranked the
highest in the function category (Notably "fast"
was not acknowledged in any way by "safe,
simple, wow") In fact, according to the brain
heat map that NeuroFocus created from the
aggregated data, speed is a huge advantage that
sets off extremely positive feelings, especially
from regular users. The more people use PayPal,
it seems, the more they appreciate how quickly
they can close transactions. For the feelings
category, "in the know" resonated best, and in
benefits, "on my side" won out.
Examining brand attributes is a standard of
traditional market testing, of course. Herstein
ran a parallel, more conventional track at the
SEPTEMBER 2011 FA5TC0MPANY.COM 123
Neuromarketing
continued from page 123
same time as his NeuroFocus study, creating a
conventional online survey The results were
significantly different. While the word "fast"
resonated with this group, the phrase "on my
side" wound up at the bottom of the benefits
category, which was topped instead by
"confident"—a word that had finished dead last
among men in the NeuroFocus study.
Herstein trusted the NeuroFocus results,
though, and set out to create a coherent global
image for the company based on them. That
image would humanize PayPal by emphasizing
the outcomes it delivers, not the act of paying;
nowhere in the new marketing would you find
any dreaded, dreary images of two people hovering
around a computer "People don't want to
see that," Herstein says. "They want to see people
enjoying either what they just bought or the
time that it gives them by paying fast."
Not everyone at the company was sold on
his new approach. The heads of some foreign
markets—Herstein declined to name which—
predicted that the new campaign would bomb.
Herstein says that his boss, PayPal president
Scott Thompson, told him he was crazy—but
Herstein was willing to stake his reputation on
the new approach.
What happened? According to Herstein,
when he changed PayPal's visual and verbal
identity across the company's email and web
pages, click-through and response rates increased
three to four times. "I'm telling you, in
the world of direct marketing, the words '400%
improvement' don't exist," he says. "If you can
go from 1.2% response rate to 1.3%, you'll get a
promotion, right? And if you can take something
from a 4% response rate to 16%? Unheard of"
Herstein has left PayPal to join Snapf ish and
now sits on NeuroFocus's board as an unpaid
adviser. While eBay confirms the basics of his
account, it won't confirm his description of the
outcomes from the marketing campaign he created;
a spokesman repeatedly asked Fast Company
not to include this information in our story
This bid for secrecy is entirely in keeping with
the aura around neuromarketing, an industry
that is both highly confident about what it can
deliver and very nervous about its perception in
the broader world. Several neuromarketing firms
were approached for this story, but the only one
that would do more than provide vague descrif)-
tions of its work was NeuroFocus, which is by
all accounts the industry leader. Out of dozens
of its corporate clients, very few would agree
to discuss their work with the firm.
Neuromarketing outfits are afraid of being
branded as trendy voodoo science, no more
trustworthy than palm readers. Such a perception,
they believe, will wither with good results.
Perhaps more worrying is the other end of the
speculative spectrum, which posits that corporations
armed with our neurological data will
be able to push a secret "buy button" in our
brains. This is a fear promulgated by, among
others, Paul B. Farrell, a columnist for Dow Jones
and author of The Millionaire Code. He calls this
buy button your brain's "true decision-making
processor," a "weapon of mass delusion." You
end up like a computer "without virus protection"
and "exposed to every Wall Street banker,
politician, and corporate CEO with gobs of cash
and a desire to manipulate your brain."
"There's still this mystique that there's a way
to control consumers and turn them into robots
to purchase products," says Ron Wright, president
and CEO of Sands Research, a rival neuromarketing
firm based in El Paso, Texas. "That is simply
not the case." Nevertheless, after spending time
with Pradeep, you get the feeling we've only just
begun to tap the potential of this new movement
Pradeep is not a neuroscientist. He's a former
GE engineer and consultant who became
fascinated by neuromarketing after a conversation
with a neuroscientist who sat next to
him on a cross-continental flight. After seven
years at the helm of NeuroFocus, he sees every
product relationship in terms of the brain, like
a virtuoso musician who hears music in everyday
sounds, from the clackety noise of a
woman's heels on a wooden floor to the mélange
of notes from a car engine.
On a sun-drenched afternoon in Berkeley,
we tour the shops at the local mall. We stop in
front of a Victoria's Secret plate-glass window
and Pradeep points out the ambiguous expression
of a lingerie model on one of its posters. He
explains that the brain is constantly looking out
for our survival and as part ofthat is always
ready to measure another person's intent Is that
stranger happy? Angry? Sad? When an expression
is not easy to decipher, we do a database
search through our collection of facescurious,
worried, nervous, threatening—to
choose which is closest to the one we see, and
match it. "If the expression is easy to decipher,
I hardly glance," he says. "But if the expression
is relatively hard to decipher, she makes me
open the cupboard of memory" Contrast this
with the nearby Bebe store, where Pradeep
shakes his head at the headless mannequins in
the window. "Now that's what I call a crime
against humanity. Money down the drain."
At the Apple store, we pause at a desktop
computer and he explains why it's always better
to put images on the left side of the screen and
text on the right: "That's how the brain likes to
see it," he says. "If you flip it around, the right
frontal looks at the words and has to flip it over
the corpus callosum to the left fTontal lobe. You
make the brain do one extra step, and the brain
hates you for that." Pradeep loves Apple, and he
loves to talk about Apple, in part because Steve
Jobs never has been and probably never will be
a client. (Apple doesn't even use focus groups.
Jonathan Ive, Apple's top designer, famously said
they lead to bland products designed to offend
no one.) But the real reason he loves talking about
Apple is that he believes the company has elevated
basic design to high art, a hugely successful
strategy that Pradeep thinks is justified by
our most basic neurological underpinnings.
Which brings us back to that iPad. Pradeep
claims the brain loves curves but detests sharp
edges, which set off an avoidance response in
our subconscious. In the same way our ancestors
stood clear of sticks or jagged stones fashioned
into weapons, we avoid sharp angles, viewing
them as potential threats. NeuroFocus has performed
several studies for retailers and food
manufacturers and found that test subjects prefer
in-store displays with rounded edges over
those with sharper edges. In one instance, when
these new rounded displays were rolled out to
replace traditional store shelving, sales rose 15%.
But curved edges are only one reason for the
iPad's success. We also like how the tablet feels,
how sleek and well balanced it is. Signals generated
by our palms and fingers, along with lips
and genitals, take up the most surface area
within our brain's sensory zone. The way a product
feels in our hands can be a major selling
point. It's why we prefer glass bottles to cans,
which NeuroFocus product-consumption studies
bear out, although it's not just the material,
it's also the slender curve of the bottle and the
ridges in it. The touch screen, too, is a mental
magnet and can induce those hormonal secretions
Pradeep likes describing.
Why we like these curves no one knows for
sure. Perhaps our brains correlate curves with
nourishment—that is to say, mommy. (Calling
Dr. Freud.) In men, it could be sexual. One study
asked men to view before-and-after pictures of
naked women who underwent cosmetic surgery
to shrink their waists and add to their derrières.
The men's brains responded as if they had been
rewarded with drugs and alcohol. But this re-
124 FASTC0MPANY.COM SEPTEMBER 2011
sponse to curves may be even more primal
than sex, or beer. Another study suggested
that men seek women with curves because
women's hips and thighs contain higher
doses of omega-3 fatty acids, which nurture
babies' brains and lead to healthier offspring.
This is the flip side to our fears of neuromarketing:
the potential to look at our choices
in a new way that blends science, psychology,
and history. Lately, NeuroFocus has been
moving into product development, providing
research to companies that will influence
how products look, feel, and ñinction before
they hit the market. That's what the firm is
doing with its Mynd crown of sensors. But
Pradeep has visions that go far beyond testing
products, packaging, and commercials.
He imagines neurotesting as ideal for courtroom
trials: A defense attorney could pretest
opening and closing arguments for emotional
resonance with mock juries. And while
NeuroFocus is not getting involved in pwlitics,
he says that competitors of his helped Republican
politicians shape their messages
for the 2010 midterm elections.
One stunning application of neurotesting
is the work of Robert Knight, Pradeep's chief
science officer, and a host of other neuroscience
researchers who are trying to develop a
way for quadriplegics to control their wheelchairs
just by thinking alone. When you watch
someone move a hand to grab a can of soda,
mirror neurons in your brain react as if you
were grasping it yourself Knight is studying
which brain signals can be translated into
software commands to drive a wheelchair.
To further this research. Knight, part of the
team that invented the Mynd, plans to give
it away to scientists and labs around the
world. And the next iteration, he promises,
will be a big step up, with eye-tracking capability,
a built-in video camera, and three times
as many sensors for greater brain coverage.
"If our limbs will not respond to the beauty
of your thinking or your feeling, that is a horror
beyond horrors," Pradeep says. "Restoring
a little bit of gesture, a little bit of movement,
a little bit of control to that beautiftil mind is
an extraordinary thing to do."
He seems sincere, passionate even,
though of course I cannot read his mind. •
Adam L Penenberg is a contributing writer
for Fast Company. His last story was
"Everyone's a Player" in the December/
January issue.
penenberg@fastcompany.com
You need a legal workforce
E-Verify makes it easier
pJMt* r«*d intlrucHon« CI
ollh»(onn ANTI.OISCRII
CANNOT •p«<;'^ '*"<' ">
m (utuf t«pir»tlon dilt ml
».clkml Einplo»»»»;
With a few clicks, E-Verify matches your employee's
Information to official government records.
E-Verify is a free. Internet-based system that allows you to
confirm the legal working status of employees in seconds.
Employment Verification.
www.dhs.gov/E-Verify
E-Verify
Vfast
secure
Copyright of Fast Company is the property of Mansueto Ventures LLC and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.