Brainwashed - The Value of Brain Scans on Predicting Behavior

The book Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience has a provocative title. The book says that brain scans – neuromarketing – isn’t any better at predicting consumer behavior than "the old standbys of surveys and focus groups," reports Matthew Hutson in a Wall Street Journal review. But we at SyncSense maintain that it is not neuroscience methodology that is at fault when predictions are not accurate, it is the way we measure the impact of neuroscience that is in error.



According to the Wall Street Journal, the book says brain scans can also blunder: In 2006, a neuroscientist declared a racy GoDaddy.com Super Bowl ad a flop after it failed to activate viewers’ pleasure centers." Funny thing: the ad increased "traffic to the site 16-fold." The problem with neuromarketing, the authors say, is that "most neural real-estate is zoned for mixed-use development." 

In other words, just because a particular part of your brain lights up doesn’t necessarily mean you’re experiencing a particular emotional response. For example, "disgust" might illuminate "your insula – a part of the cerebral cortex involved in attention, emotion and other functions," but that doesn’t mean "that whenever the insula lights up you’re disgusted." It could mean something else entirely. It’s more complicated than that. Of course, this didn’t stop one neuromarketer from using brain-scan data "to claim that Apple users literally adore their devices." 

More serious is the application of brain scans – or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as it is known – in criminal cases. "Predictably, defense attorneys try to use brain scans to prove that their clients lack … impulse control and therefore can’t be held legally responsible." In medicine, the authors say, the use of fMRIs has conflated addiction with brain disease. Even more profoundly, reducing the brain to a "biological machine" undercuts the concept of "free will" and "personal accountability." In short: "Neuroimaging isn’t the hard science we like to think it is."

Many companies use biometrics, heart rate, eye tracking, sweating and brain imaging to "predict" what the respondent is actually feeling an thinking. This can often be misinterpreted. At SyncSense we measure effectiveness, attention and call to action using hard data such as Nielsen ratings and direct response calls. In this way we KNOW that our methodology not only has validity but also impact.