Meet Carl Marci: A Doctor Who Wants To Measure Your Emotions

10 PEJ JANUARY􀁳FEBRUARY/2012
By Tony Bartelme
Meet Carl Marci: A Doctor Who Wants
To Measure Your Emotions
Profile
In this article…
Fascinated by research to see what makes people tick,
a Massachusetts doctor and entrepreneur is working
on ways to measure emotional responses to what
people see on the TV and the Internet.
In 1936, an engineer named Arthur C. Nielsen learned
about a device called an audiometer. Invented by two professors
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
audiometer kept a minute-by-minute record of whether a
radio was on or off and where the dial was set.
Nielsen had a yen to measure things and already owned
a company that sampled sales from grocery stores to identify
broader retail trends. What could he measure with an
audiometer?
At the time, radio stations sometimes calibrated a
show’s popularity by counting listeners’ letters. Nielsen
thought he could do better and installed audiometers in a
select group of radios, and later, televisions; he supplemented
this with diaries sent to anonymous “Nielsen families,”
who jotted down when and what shows they watched.
Today, Nielsen’s rating system remains the most recognized
arbiter of the multi-billion-dollar television industry,
creator and destroyer of sit-coms and news anchor careers.
Yet, this important barometer of pop-culture has limits:
the Nielsens capture what we watch but not our immediate
reactions to what we see and hear; they don’t tell us
what’s going on inside our heads.
Fast forward to 2004. A psychiatrist named Carl Marci,
MD, also was fascinated by measurement, especially when it
came to interactions between doctors and patients. At the
time, Marci was director of Harvard Medical School’s social
neuroscience program at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He had long wondered how certain doctors and therapists
established rapport with patients; he had even counted the
number of laughs between patients and therapists during
counseling sessions.
Like Nielsen, Marci eventually found inspiration at
MIT, in this case, with Brian Levine, a business school
student who had helped create Web sites for Major
League Baseball. Together, Marci and Levine co-founded
Innerscope Research, a company that uses biometric devices
to measure emotional responses to images on television,
the Internet, and other media. Their goal was to take the
Nielsen concept to another level—measure what’s happening
in our hearts to get a better idea of what’s going on in
our heads.
Today, their company is on the second floor of a brick
building a block from the narrow streets and Italian restaurants
of Boston’s North End. The sparsely decorated offices
have the freshly carpeted and urgent hum of a maturing
start-up.
In one room, a silver mannequin stands in the corner
with Innerscope’s black biometric belt wrapped around its
torso; nearby, young men and women click away on computers;
Marci, the company’s chief executive officer, can be
heard in a conference room talking with a client.
‘Neural wi-fi’
Marci is 42 years old and has a runner’s lean 6-foot-2
frame and longish hair parted in center. He enjoys yoga,
gourmet cooking and non-fiction books. During a recent
conversation, he talked about his fascination with Born to
Run, a book about distance runners in a remote corner of
Mexico. “As an athlete and student of psychology, I’m absolutely
fascinated by ultra-distance runners, how they manage
pain, and how they don’t have injuries.”
Marci’s research and use of biometrics comes amid an
explosion in understanding about the brain’s neural wiring.
Marci is particularly intrigued by research showing that
our brains are designed to be sociable: mirror neurons help
us sense and feel what others experience; spindle neurons
enable us to make quick decisions in social situations.
ACPE.ORG 11
Clockwise from center.
Participants in the research studies watch TV shows and commercials in
Innerscope Research’s viewing room. (Photo by Tony Bartelme.)
Innerscope Research employee Rachel Sockut demonstrates the company's
biometric vest, which measures skin sweat, heart rate and motion. The company
also has devices that measure eye movement. (Photo by Tony Bartelme.)
Carl Marci in his office at Innerscope Research, in downtown Boston.
(Photo provided by Innerscope Research.)
12 PEJ JANUARY􀁳FEBRUARY/2012
school, he played varsity basketball
on a playoff team. During track season,
he focused on the high jump
and became one of the best in state,
leaping six-feet, eight inches. Yet, his
main goal would be to be a doctor.
He decided this when he was 13.
“I came across one of those career
books that asked something like: ‘Do
you like science? Do you like people?
Well, then you too could be a doctor.’”
That day he told his parents he
would be a doctor someday. “They
said, ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ But I never
wavered from that point.”
Marci was a strong student, and
with his athletic accomplishments,
had plenty of scholarship offers. He
decided on Columbia University.
“The track coach said, ‘This is the Ivy
League. I want you to have the track
experience, but I really want you to
go to med school.”
At Columbia, he continued his
upward trajectory. On the track, he
jumped an unofficial personal best
of six-feet, 10 inches. Off the track,
between his sophomore and junior
years he monitored the weights of 70
homebound AIDS patients in New York
for a nutrition program, an effort that
led Time magazine to cite him as one of
the nation’s top college achievers.
He earned a Rhodes Scholarship
to Oxford and went to Harvard
Medical School, where he struggled at
first. “I almost failed anatomy class,
but then we started the neuroscience
bloc, and I was introduced to the
brain at all levels and intricacies and
knew I had found my calling.”
Marci says he also was inspired
by a course on alternative medicine
taught by David Eisenberg. “He
brought in massage therapists, chiro-
Since its creation, Innerscope
Research has done breakthrough
research on television viewing habits,
especially how people process information
when they use TiVo and other
digital video recorders. Good Morning
America featured the company’s technology
for a spot about how people
respond to Super Bowl ads; the company
also has studied the emotional
impact of pundit-driven news versus
traditional news formats. (Pundits win
hands down in emotional engagement.)
At first glance, advertising would
seem a far cry from medicine. But
Marci says the gap between the two
isn’t so wide, and he says he remains
committed to research into how relationships
relieve physical and mental
suffering.
“As for the role of Innerscope in
this, we measure a different kind of
relationship, no less important: the
relationship of audiences to marketing
and media communications of all
types. It is striking to me how similar
the two ultimately are in reality.”
Leap ahead
Marci grew up in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, “very middle class,” he
said. His father was a civil engineer
who worked at IBM; his mom was a
librarian at a local community college.
He was the youngest of four athletic
siblings and jokes that he was a
surprise conceived while his brothers
were playing whiffle ball.
Being the youngest has benefits;
he and his brothers, for instance,
were competitive basketball players,
“which means I got used to losing.”
It also prepared him for winning; by
eighth grade, he was able to dunk a
basketball, and as a freshman in high
Science writer Daniel Goleman
calls this sub-cranial connectivity a
form of “neural wi-fi.” Marci says we
can see and measure this neural dance
at work through non-conscious activity
in our brains, emotion-based signals
that often frame our decisions about
whether we buy a certain product or
decide to ask someone on a date.
Innerscope Research is one of a
growing number of neuromarketing
companies formed in the past decade
to measure these non-conscious
processes. Another is NeuroFocus, a
subsidiary of Nielsen.
Caroline Winnet, NeuroFocus
chief marketing officer, describes
neuromarketing as an attempt to
understand “consumer behavior
without asking questions.” When
people are asked in surveys after
shopping for a product or watching
television, they often struggle to
remember why or how they felt. “Our
field exists because much of what we
do and decisions we make are influenced
by things we’re not aware of.”
NeuroFocus uses a wearable cap
that measures brain waves and other
biometric signals. Marci’s company
uses a biometric belt worn around
the mid chest that collects data from
skin sweat, respiration, heart rate
and motion along with a device that
tracks eye movement.
Marci says by analyzing these
data, his company is able to see in
real time whether people are moved
by an image or disengaged. For a psychiatrist,
it’s like opening a door to
a person’s emotions. For a company
trying to attract consumers, it can
mean the difference between an ad
that bores people or turns a product
into a household word.
Marci also dismisses the idea that neuromarketers
identify “buy buttons” or “control minds” anytime
soon; the brain is simply too complex.
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Sandy Pentland, an oft-cited
expert on computational science, is
one of the lab’s creators. Pentland
was fascinated with technology that
uses sensors to identify subtle patterns
in human behavior. “They were
doing some work on speed dating and
how well people bluff at poker,” Marci
recalled. He and Pentland became
fast friends, and Pentland asked him
to co-teach a course on innovation.
Brian Levine was one of their
students. Levine had done market
research for the Mayo Clinic, Fidelity
Investments and other national clients
and had decided to return to business
school after the dot com bust.
As part of the innovation course,
Marci talked about his use of biometric
devices on doctors and patients.
“Brian asked me, what about applying
it to (television) audiences?” Levine
then created a business plan as part
of the course that became the foundation
for Innerscope Research. “At
the time, I was having trouble finding
grants,” Marci says, “I thought, ‘this
sounds interesting.’”
TiVo time
Innerscope Research’s first project
was for NBC.
“They had a problem,” Marci
said. “They had a show called Heroes
that had about 10 million people
watching it, but it also was a very
techie-oriented audience, and they
estimated that three million watched
it on a DVR, so Nielsen was giving
them credit for only seven million.”
This question about the impact
of DVRs and TiVo went to the heart
of the television industry’s advertising-
driven business model: If people
were skipping through commercials,
why should they pay for them? But
NBC had some in-house data that had
them scratching their heads: Viewers
who used DVRs still seemed to recall
information about the commercials
they supposedly had skipped.
lyzing when patients and counselors
laughed, and monitored skin sweat
of participants. They learned that
laughter was more than a response to
humor; rather it was part of the nonconscious
communication duet that
takes place when people talk.
When patients laughed, therapists
experienced similar feelings
of arousal; when both patients and
therapists laughed together, the emotional
measures of both participants
doubled, a demonstration of empathy
and laughter’s contagious nature.
Marci sometimes used these
biometric measures on himself and
friends. One time he went to his
therapist to talk about his marriage
proposal to his girlfriend. She had
said yes, and he was thrilled.
During the counseling session,
Marci and his therapist were hooked up
to heart rate and skin-sweat response
devices. When Marci looked at the
charts afterward, he noticed how the
lines from his therapist rose and fell
with his, another measure of rapport.
Another time, he was watching
Sex in the City with a friend. Again,
both were connected to biometric
devices, and Marci noticed how
their bodies responded similarly
to dramatic moments in the show.
He realized then that our ability to
empathize with characters on television
produced real neural changes,
perhaps explaining why video images
are such a powerful medium.
In 2004, Marci was searching
for new ways to measure these emotional
responses, when a friend suggested
he check out MIT’s Media Lab.
The Media Lab is the incubator of
products ranging from Guitar Hero
to foldable cars.
The lab sits in a modern boxlike
building on MIT’s campus in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has an
inner atrium with white walls washed
in natural light and glass windows
that shield cluttered offices full of
robots, musical instruments and
other gizmos.
practors, people who practiced Reiki.
It was just amazing. And the one thing
I noticed that they all had in common
was that they were very good at generating
relationships with patients.”
Later in his training, Marci
worked with a primary care physician,
John Abramson, who had a
special knack for establishing rapport
with patients. (Abramson has since
authored a book on medications called
Overdosed America.) Marci noticed how
Abramson’s practice was on a firm
financial footing, and that his patients
on average had fewer health problems
than those in similar practices.
“I asked him to tell me how he
did it, and he would say, ‘I kept them
out of the hospital.’ I would ask,
‘Well, how did you do that?’ and he
said, ‘I just took care of them.” Marci
wondered if he could find a way
to measure this rapport, and with
Abramson’s help, bought a device
that measures skin sweat. He borrowed
his father’s video camera and
watched how Abramson interacted
with patients.
In the end, he didn’t do much
with these measurements, but his
interest in rapport and doctor-patient
relationships grew as he chose his
specialty—psychiatry. “If there is an
entity on the planet that could heal
without laying hands on a person, no
surgery and no pills, wouldn’t you
want to understand it?”
Laughter, the best
medicine?
When he finished his psychiatric
training, he sought grants for
research into depression. “That’s
where the money for research was.”
But he was drawn to laughter.
“Despite its ubiquity in social interactions,
not a lot of people were studying
laughter at the time,” he says.
In a study published in 2004 by
the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease, he and colleagues videotaped
therapy sessions, identifying and ana14
PEJ JANUARY􀁳FEBRUARY/2012
and behavior for our clients. If that
means more relevant ads and entertainment
programs for the public,
that would be a good thing.”
Marci sees patients a few times
a month to keep his psychiatry skills
sharp. “I still think of myself as a
physician, scientist and entrepreneur.”
And he predicts that neuroscience
will identify more ways that
relationships can relieve suffering.
He recalls a patient who had
severe bipolar disorder and was in
and out of hospital, until she met a
man who became her boyfriend. For
reasons we still don’t understand,
their neural wiring fused. Since then,
the woman hasn’t been hospitalized.
“Relationships will always matter,”
Marci says. And the complexity of
relationships and the brain’s role in
how they play out will always be an
exciting challenge to measure.
Tony Bartelme is an award-winning freelance
writer based in Charleston, SC.
This research allowed CNN to
show how relationships can enhance
the power of a message. “Biometrics
are a great way of getting at actual
changes in behavior,” Liebman said.
“You can’t always trust people to be
honest in surveys.”
Too much information?
As the neuromarketing industry
has grown, so have questions about
how its research is used. Consumer
watchdogs criticize neuromarketers
for using tools of science and medicine
to identify “buy buttons” inside
people’s heads to promote sales of
products over healing.
In 2004, the group Commercial
Alert called for a congressional investigation
into neuromarketing’s potential
effects on politics after a UCLA
study found brains of Republican subjects
reacted differently than brains
of Democrats to images of Sept. 11,
2001. “Orwellian is not too strong a
term for this prospect,” the group’s
director at the time said.
Marci says the high ethical standards
in medicine offer one path for
neuromarketing research. He says
Innerscope uses medical standards
used by large teaching hospitals,
including efforts to ensure that participants
understand and consent to
what they’re doing.
Neuromarketing should be treated
like any scientific research, he
says. “We believe that there needs to
be a universal standard which places
human safety first and foremost, not
a separate standard for neurosciencebased
methods.”
Marci also dismisses that neuromarketers
identify “buy buttons” or
“control minds” anytime soon; the
brain is simply too complex. And he
says there’s no inherent evil in market
research. “It is a business like any
other and is a long way from needing
any government intervention or regulation.
Our goal is to do a better job
of understanding human emotions
For the NBC study, Innerscope
used biometric vests on viewers and
monitored their responses as they
fast-forwarded through the commercials.
When they analyzed the results,
they were shocked; instead of ignoring
the commercials, viewers were in
a hyper-state of alertness—so alert
that their minds were processing the
images on a non-conscious level.
“The next-day recall was twice as
much as what we would have expected,
” he said. “The DVR was supposed
to kill commercial television, but it
hasn’t. Here’s why.” The study’s findings
landed in The Wall Street Journal
and New York Times.
“That launched us,” Marci said.
Later, Innerscope Research did work
for Campbell Soup Company, analyzing
how shoppers respond as they
walked down a grocery aisle and
approached the company’s soup display.
Innerscope found that shoppers
tended to react unemotionally to the
daunting rows of cans.
Campbell Soup later redesigned
its displays and soup labels, in some
cases, adding steam to pictures of the
soup because people reacted more
emotionally to images that suggested
the food was warm.
Marci says his research confirms
the power of emotions to guide our
decisions. During a presentation at
MIT last year, Marci cited neurologist
Donald Caine, who once said, “the
essential difference between emotion
and reason is that emotion leads
to action while reason leads to
conclusions.”
Nostalgia, sex and peer pressure
are powerful emotional triggers.
Another Innerscope study for CNN,
for instance, examined the effects of
people recommending news Web sites
to others using Facebook. The research
found that when people read stories
recommended by friends they’re five
times more engaged by those stories,
said Gregg Liebman, senior vice president
of ad sales at CNN.
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