Our Brains

Much of our memory's work takes place while we're asleep, reports The Economist (2/2/13). A paper by Robert Stickgold of Harvard University and Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, proposes that "sleep acts as a form of triage -- first choosing what to retain and then selecting how it will be retained." What they found was that "sleep does indeed help people discard information they have been told to forget."

They also found that sleep "helps guide memories intended to be retained down particular paths -- remembering patterns, for example, as opposed to facts." Two studies found that only babies who had the opportunity to take a nap could later recall patterns of fake grammar to which they had been earlier exposed. A separate paper, by Matthew Walker and Bryce Mander, meanwhile looked "into the matter of forgetting, by comparing the process in the young and the old."

Not surprisingly, they found that older people (those in their 60s and 70s) did not retain nonsensical word pairs as well as younger people (those in their teens and 20s), both when tested immediately and after some sleep (the oldsters did even worse after sleep). Of course, older people don't need to remember as much as the younger, given that "they are already familiar with so much of what they experience. So it may be that their inability to form new memories is not a bug, but a feature."

Brain-scan Technique Sheds Light on Vision

Every time you open your eyes, visual information flows into your brain, which interprets what you’re seeing. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have non-invasively mapped this flow of information in the human brain with unique accuracy, using a novel brain-scanning technique.
This technique, which combines two existing technologies, allows researchers to identify precisely both the location and timing of human brain activity. Using this new approach, the MIT researchers scanned individuals’ brains as they looked at different images and were able to pinpoint, to the millisecond, when the brain recognizes and categorizes an object, and where these processes occur.

“This method gives you a visualization of ‘when’ and ‘where’ at the same time. It’s a window into processes happening at the millisecond and millimeter scale,” says Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Oliva is the senior author of a paper describing the findings in Nature Neuroscience. Lead author of the paper is CSAIL postdoc Radoslaw Cichy. Dimitrios Pantazis, a research scientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is also an author of the paper.

When and where
Until now, scientists have been able to observe the location or timing of human brain activity at high resolution, but not both, because different imaging techniques are not easily combined. The most commonly used type of brain scan, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measures changes in blood flow, revealing which parts of the brain are involved in a particular task. However, it works too slowly to keep up with the brain’s millisecond-by-millisecond dynamics.

Another imaging technique, known as magnetoencephalography (MEG), uses an array of hundreds of sensors encircling the head to measure magnetic fields produced by neuronal activity in the brain. These sensors offer a dynamic portrait of brain activity over time, down to the millisecond, but do not tell the precise location of the signals.

To combine the time and location information generated by these two scanners, the researchers used a computational technique called representational similarity analysis, which relies on the fact that two similar objects (such as two human faces) that provoke similar signals in fMRI will also produce similar signals in MEG. This method has been used before to link fMRI with recordings of neuronal electrical activity in monkeys, but the MIT researchers are the first to use it to link fMRI and MEG data from human subjects.

In the study, the researchers scanned 16 human volunteers as they looked at a series of 92 images, including faces, animals, and natural and man-made objects. Each image was shown for half a second. “We wanted to measure how visual information flows through the brain. It’s just pure automatic machinery that starts every time you open your eyes, and it’s incredibly fast,” Cichy says. “This is a very complex process, and we have not yet looked at higher cognitive processes that come later, such as recalling thoughts and memories when you are watching objects.”

Each subject underwent the test multiple times — twice in an fMRI scanner and twice in an MEG scanner — giving the researchers a huge set of data on the timing and location of brain activity. All of the scanning was done at the Athinoula Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute.

Millisecond by millisecond
By analyzing this data, the researchers produced a timeline of the brain’s object-recognition pathway that is very similar to results previously obtained by recording electrical signals in the visual cortex of monkeys, a technique that is extremely accurate but too invasive to use in humans.

About 50 milliseconds after subjects saw an image, visual information entered a part of the brain called the primary visual cortex, or V1, which recognizes basic elements of a shape, such as whether it is round or elongated. The information then flowed to the inferotemporal cortex, where the brain identified the object as early as 120 milliseconds. Within 160 milliseconds, all objects had been classified into categories such as plant or animal.

The MIT team’s strategy “provides a rich new source of evidence on this highly dynamic process,” says Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, a principal investigator in cognition and brain sciences at Cambridge Univ.

“The combination of MEG and fMRI in humans is no surrogate for invasive animal studies with techniques that simultaneously have high spatial and temporal precision, but Cichy et al. come closer to characterizing the dynamic emergence of representational geometries across stages of processing in humans than any previous work. The approach will be useful for future studies elucidating other perceptual and cognitive processes,” says Kriegeskorte, who was not part of the research team.
The MIT researchers are now using representational similarity analysis to study the accuracy of computer models of vision by comparing brain scan data with the models’ predictions of how vision works.

Using this approach, scientists should also be able to study how the human brain analyzes other types of information such as motor, verbal or sensory signals, the researchers say. It could also shed light on processes that underlie conditions such as memory disorders or dyslexia, and could benefit patients suffering from paralysis or neurodegenerative diseases.

“This is the first time that MEG and fMRI have been connected in this way, giving us a unique perspective,” Pantazis says. “We now have the tools to precisely map brain function both in space and time, opening up tremendous possibilities to study the human brain.”

Writers and Athletes Brains

The more we know about the workings of the brain, the more surprising some of the conclusions are. Here is something from the New York Times:

Neuroscientists are finding surprising similarities in the brain activity of writers and athletes, reports Carl Zimmer in The New York Times (6/28/14). The scientists, "led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany," are using "scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers." Dr. Lotze started by having 28 novice writers "copy some text" to provide a baseline, and then gave them a few lines from a story to finish on their own — giving them time to brainstorm a bit first, and then write.

He and his team found that the vision-processing part of the brain lit up during brainstorming, perhaps because they were "seeing the scenes they wanted to write." This changed when the trials turned to more experienced writers, whose "brains appeared to work differently even before they set pen to paper." Their brains activated "regions involving speech," rather than vision. One theory is "that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice." 

Also unlike the novices, the brains of the experienced writers lit up "a region called the caudate nucleus," which "plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like … playing basketball," or a musical instrument. However, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is skeptical that the experiments provide a clear picture of creativity, pointing out, among other things, that the "very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next." "Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study," he says.

SyncSense Concept Proven Through Brain Research

The basic concept of SyncSense is that since human brain activity is associated with audiovisual perception and attention, the refinement of such stimuli in a short for video results in more neural synchrony and therefore higher perception, engagement and attention.

This is all born out in a 2007 study from Neuroimage:
"Coherent perception of objects in our environment often requires perceptual integration of auditory and visual information. Recent behavioral data suggest that audiovisual integration depends on attention. The current study investigated the neural basis of audiovisual integration using 3-Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 12 healthy volunteers during attention to auditory or visual features, or audiovisual feature combinations of abstract stimuli (simultaneous harmonic sounds and colored circles). 

Audiovisual attention was found to modulate activity in the same frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital cortical regions as auditory and visual attention. In addition, attention to audiovisual feature combinations produced stronger activity in the superior temporal cortices than attention to only auditory or visual features. These modality-specific areas might be involved in attention-dependent perceptual binding of synchronous auditory and visual events into coherent audiovisual objects. 

Furthermore, the modality-specific temporal auditory and occipital visual cortical areas showed attention-related modulations during both auditory and visual attention tasks. This result supports the proposal that attention to stimuli in one modality can spread to encompass synchronously presented stimuli in another modality."

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.

Dog Brains vs Cat Brains

An interesting article from Cool News talks about the differences in dog brains vs cats and even rats. I think it may also be impacted by other senses such as sense of smell when it comes to locating food sources but the differences in the way the brain enable retention, even in animals, corroborates our brain synchrony findings.

The genius of dogs is in their relationship with humans, write Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, authors of The Genius of Dogs, in The Wall Street Journal. While other language-trained animals can "learn to respond to dozens of spoken signals associated with different objects," dogs are the only animals that have demonstrated an ability to learn the names of objects the same way humans do. A 2004 experiment by Juliane Kaminski of University of Portsmouth in Britain, involved a dog named Rico, who could infer the name of a new toy simply because the name was different from that of the toys he already knew, just like a human.

Dogs have only "half as many neurons in their cerebral cortex as cats," but apparently have better memories. "Several years ago, Sylvain Fiset of Canada's University of Moncton and colleagues reported experiments in which a dog or cat watched while a researcher hid a reward in one of four boxes. After a delay, they were allowed to search for a treat. Cats started guessing after only one minute. But even after four minutes, dogs hadn't forgotten where they saw the food." Okay, so maybe the cats are just too smart to be bothered with "playing our silly games."

Dogs are not as bright when it comes to "navigational memory." Rats -- not cats this time -- performed better at finding food through a maze. In a contest against wolves, dogs were not as adept at figuring out how to get at food "placed on the opposite side of a fence, as shown by a study by Harry and Martha Frank of the University of Michigan." However, a later study out of Hungary found that dogs solved the problem immediately after observing "a human rounding the fence first," suggesting that "the secret of the genius of dogs" is when they "join forces with us."

Our Brains Can't Chew Popcorn and Listen At The Same Time

One of the conclusions we reached in our brain synchrony work is that when different parts of the brain (sound, text, patterns, colors, movement, for example) are stimulated at the same time from the same stimuli, that helps us retain messages. So when scientists found that chewing while listening disrupts comprehension, we were not surprised. 

According to Bloomberg Businessweek (10/28/13) and as reported by Cool News, researchers at the University of Cologne conducted a test where half the subjects were given a sugar cube during the pre-movie commercials, while the other half was given popcorn. A week later, all of the subjects were exposed to images of the advertised products and the "sugar-cube moviegoers had a clear preference" for them "while the popcorn eaters didn’t. In other words, the ads hadn’t stuck with them

The result had nothing to do with popcorn, per se. The reason is that when people read or hear something, "the brain simulates the corresponding muscle movement of the throat and mouth … Chewing, however, disrupts the process by monopolizing the speech muscles (unlike eating a sugar cube, which dissolves on its own), effectively drowning out any subvocalization and, with it, the process of familiarization." 

An earlier study produced a similar result when subjects were chewing gum (or not). The research undermines conventional wisdom that "mere exposure" to an image or message "predisposes people to liking it." It also "has ramifications" beyond advertising, as "there are plenty of settings in which people are trying to absorb new information while eating – the working breakfast, the client dinner, the lunch consumed resentfully at one’s desk while trying to catch up on e-mail. Those might all be occasions in which we’re not taking in information as easily as calories."

SyncSense in MultiChannel News

Neuroscience Tools for Better Tune-In Promos and More

By: Gary Arlen Aug 28 2013 - 3:35am

In your Psych 101 class (or when you started to create PowerPoint presentations), you learned to reinforce messages by coordinating visual and verbal ingredients.  In the neuroscience course, which you probably didn’t take, you would learn how to boost that eye/ear reinforcement even further via “brain synchronization.”

So if you got a job in advertising or promotion, you’d use a tool to optimize the simultaneous impact. Cable networks including TNT, AMC Networks, HBO and We, along with ABC News and NBC News have been quietly testing “SyncSense,” a software tool that makes sure the synchronization is instant. Even a 1/10th- second delay can reduce the impact, says Daniel Fischer, a co-founder of the eponymous company.

Moreover, SyncScore – a measurement system that is part of the company’s service – tracks message recognition.  In a project for AMC, SyncScore identified an uptick of 17% to 36% in recall levels for synched promotions within the 25 to 54 year old age bracket; the major variable was the placement of a synched message within an advertising pod.

Initially, SyncSense is concentrating on tune-in promotions, including on-network video messages as well as program intro segments; those few moments at the top of the hour are crucial attention-getting opportunities while viewers are surfing around to choose a show to watch.
“It improves audience retention during breaks,” Fischer emphasizes, focusing on the company’s primary selling point: retaining viewers.

Tightly coordinating voice/text messages are already a fundamental part of commercials, especially direct response and infomercials.   Fischer, an alumnus of Nielsen, Discovery and Warner Cable, believes that the neural connections can also be used in reality programs, movies, dramas and short-form videos, such as the fast-evolving online video sector.

He and his colleagues, who include John Ford (formerly of Discovery and National Geographic Channel) and Charlene Weisler (an ex-AMC executive),  acknowledge the challenge of introducing a new production tool to advertisers and TV promotion departments that have an established format for producing their video materials.  SyncSense is emphasizing the measurement factor, which is at the core of its own revenue model.

The system has been used on more than 80 shows, ranging from HBO’s “Real Sports” to NBC Nightly News.  SyncScore ratings (developed in collaboration with Nielsen data) show that tightly synched voice/text delivery increases full-show ratings by at least 2.8% and up to 7.4% in the youngest – and most fidgety – age brackets. Fischer and his team are promoting these viewership bumps as a way to drive viewers “more efficiently from promos to programs,” which leads to improved Nielsen results and higher ad rates, as he repeatedly points out.

The company’s patent-pending technology optimizes brain sync, which in turn increases attention.  SyncSense is also exploring other multi-input factors that can increase viewer attention, such as the context of on-screen messages.  Included in this dimension are color, movement, luminance, shapes, patterns and even what Fischer calls “gestalt criteria.”   Collectively, these ingredients can be used in various combinations to trigger those neural sensors that reinforce video messages.
Plug that into your brain next time you’re looking for something to watch.

Mind Reading Computer Could Communicate with Coma Patients

Canadian researchers have developing a mind-reading computer that could help communicate with people in a coma. 

The University of Western Ontario researchers used neuroimaging to read human thoughts via brain activity when they are conveying specific ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. The team say their research could lead to dramatic new ways of attempting to communicate with patients in a vegetative state.
 
In the study, participants were asked to concentrate on a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response to questions like 'Are you married?' or 'Do you have brothers and sisters?' and only think their response, not speak it. By analyzing their brain activity, the team were able to accurately read their answers to a series of questions.

Their findings were published in The Journal of Neuroscience in a study titled, The Brain's Silent Messenger: Using Selective Attention to Decode Human Thought for Brain-Based Communication.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2333861/Mind-reading-communicate-people-coma-Researchers-say-understand-answers-simple-questions-using-brain-scans.html#ixzz2VC7XUvkQ
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Why We Love Beautiful Things

This article from the New York Times alludes to the type pf work we do here at SyncSense. That is, there are some stimuli that impacts the brain in a very viseral, psychological manner that can make us more attuned to messages, more engaged in content and  more apt to take action on messaging. 

The full article can be accessed here. The following is an excerpt:

GREAT design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.

Yet, while we are drawn to good design, as Mr. Hamel points out, we’re not quite sure why.

This is starting to change. A revolution in the science of design is already under way, and most people, including designers, aren’t even aware of it.

Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment.

This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace. In studies of call centers, for example, workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 percent more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.

In some cases the same effect can happen with a photographic or even painted mural, whether or not it looks like an actual view of the outdoors. Corporations invest heavily to understand what incentivizes employees, and it turns out that a little color and a mural could do the trick.

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.

We respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent — just by being in our field of vision. One researcher has calculated that since Americans spend $300 billion a year dealing with stress-related illness, the economic benefits of these shapes, widely applied, could be in the billions.

What Our Brains Can Tell Us

This recent article from the New York Times helps give insight into they type of neuroscience we practice here at SyncSense. The connection of neurons and how they are connected is the basis to creating more effective videos that optimize viewer connection, awareness and engagement. Read on...

AFTER President Obama’s recent announcement of a plan to invigorate the study of neuroscience with what could amount to a $3 billion investment, a reasonable taxpayer might ask: Why brain science? Why now? 

Here’s why. Imagine you were an alien catching sight of the Earth. Your species knows nothing about humans, let alone how to interpret the interactions of seven billion people in complex social networks. With no acquaintance with the nuances of human language or behavior, it proves impossible to decipher the secret idiom of neighborhoods and governments, the interplay of local and global culture, or the intertwining economies of nations. It just looks like pandemonium, a meaningless Babel. 

So it goes with the brain. We are the aliens in that landscape, and the brain is an even more complicated cipher. It is composed of 100 billion electrically active cells called neurons, each connected to many thousands of its neighbors. Each neuron relays information in the form of miniature voltage spikes, which are then converted into chemical signals that bridge the gap to other neurons. Most neurons send these signals many times per second; if each signaling event were to make a sound as loud as a pin dropping, the cacophony from a single human head would blow out all the windows. The complexity of such a system bankrupts our language; observing the brain with our current technologies, we mostly detect an enigmatic uproar. 

Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously. 

That’s a tall order, but it’s worth it, because this is an exceptionally personal mystery to crack. Our thoughts, desires, agonies and ecstasies all emerge from the details of the neural landscape.

Just as an alien studying the planet could catalog several large-scale calamities — disease epidemics, volcanic eruptions, political-feedback loops that lead to war — so can we observe disasters transpiring in the dense communities of our brain cells. We give them names like neurodegeneration, stroke and epilepsy. But just because we can name them doesn’t mean we know how to fix them. For example, we have little idea how to mend the damage from the widespread destruction of a traumatic brain injury (the signature injury of America’s wars). The same goes for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, and for brain tumors, autism, dementia, paralysis and so on. 

While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems, we have yet to understand how to remedy them. Learning to better speak the language of the brain is our best hope for turning the chaos into order, for unmasking and addressing the hidden patterns behind disease. 

But deciphering the neural code is not only about physical health. Consider the implications for societal health. A deeper understanding of mental illness will improve early detection, resources and rehabilitation, potentially helping us find a way to stop using our prisons as a de facto mental health care system. Similarly, we can leverage brain science for a more cost-effective approach to drug crime. We cannot win the war on drugs simply by attacking supply; we must focus on demand. And that requires decoding the circuitry and pharmacology in the brain of the addict. 

Beyond social policy, a better understanding of the brain will steer the future of our technologies. Smart people have been beating at the door of artificial intelligence for decades with only limited success. Google Translate can convert any language to any other, but understands nothing of the content. Watson still can’t answer simple questions like, “When President Obama walks into a room, does his nose come with him?” Our most promising hope for creating artificial intelligence is figuring out how natural intelligence works. 

It can also usher in an era of bio-inspired machinery. You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your smartphone and expect the phone to function. But when a young child with severe epilepsy has half of her brain surgically removed, she tends to do just fine: the remaining brain tissue automatically rewires itself to take over responsibility for the parts that are missing. Similarly, when an animal breaks a leg, its brain adapts the gait of the remaining legs so the animal can keep moving.

We don’t know how to build self-configuring machines like these. When a Mars rover loses a wheel, our investment ends: it becomes another piece of immovable space junk. Imagine a future in which we capitalize on the principles of neural reconfiguration, producing devices — from smartphones to cars to space stations — that flexibly adapt rather than bust. For now, the brain is the only functioning example of such futuristic machinery on our planet. 

Brain health, drug rehabilitation, computer intelligence, adaptive devices — these economic drivers would lavishly pay back any investment in brain research. So when a taxpayer asks how to endow our country with a confident future, you can reply, the answer is right in back of your eyes.

David Eagleman, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, is the author of “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 23, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: What Our Brains Can Teach Us.

Neuromyths

This article on neuromyths  was published on Reveries.com . It outlines three commonly held neuromyths that are actually false.



1. "The idea that we use only ten percent of our brain is patently false," report Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Wall Street Journal. If you thought it was true, don't feel bad, because so do about two-thirds of the American public. Apparently the myth is perpetuated by neuroimaging research "showing only a small number of areas 'lighting up' in a brain scan, but those are just areas that have more than a base line level of activity; the dark regions aren't dormant or unused."

2. Another popular neuromyth is that "enriching children's environments will strengthen their brains." This myth "may have emerged from evidence that rats raised in cages with amenities like exercise wheels, tunnels and other rats showed better cognitive abilities and improvements in brain structure compared with rats that grew up isolated in bare cages." All that means is that a "truly impoverished and unnatural environment leads to poorer development." It doesn't mean that "constant exposure to 'Baby Einstein'-type videos ... will boost cognitive development."

3. A third neuromyth is that "students perform better when lessons are delivered in their preferred learning style." One study found that 94 percent of teachers believe this to be true, but according to a study by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, it is false. He's done studies that show that visual presentation leads to better memory than does verbal, but there is "no relationship between a learner's preferences and the instruction style." Another study found that many people "believe that memory works like a video recording or that they can tell when someone is staring at the back of their head." 

Thank you to Tim Manners, the editor of Cool News.

SyncSense at CTAM Insights 2012

SyncSense is a proud sponsor of the 2012 CTAM Insights conference, an excerpt of which is in this article from Charlene Weisler's WeislerMedia blog.

Right and Left Side of the Boomer Brain

This recent article in Mediapost.com on brain hemispheres and what attracts Boomers might be of interest to you.

The article talks about the right and left sides of the brain and how each side processes information differently. This impacts how marketers should present their messages to consumers - in this articles, case, to Boomers.

What can understanding how the brain functions help online and traditional marketers? The answer is plenty. For example, since the left brain is resistant to new information regardless of how brilliantly it is presented, the left brain will generally not process new information coming into the brain unless it has first been processed by the right brain. The right brain pays attention to stories but not lectures. Stories should be word pictures because the right brain’s command of verbal language is somewhat primitive.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/184147/go-with-the-grain-of-the-brain.html#ixzz29ap8vOfr

We at Syncsense realize that the way the brain receives and processes messages can impact how these messages are  interpreted, accepted (or not) and acted upon (or not). Our patent pending guidelines can help media companies prepare their content in a way that can optimize its value to the viewer.

This is Your Brain on Jane Austen

Susan Celia Greenfield, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University and Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, does research on Jane Austen. 

In a recent study of readers of Austen, it appears as if Austen is making news in the field of neuroscience. 

Here is an excerpt of a recent Greenfield blog post:
The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging (CNi) has been tracking the blood flow patterns in the brains of Austen readers. How? By having literature graduate students read the second chapter of Mansfield Park while getting brain images using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The subjects were asked to alternate styles, reading some passages for pleasure and others with the kind of close critical attention required in literature courses like my own. The preliminary results surprised the researchers. Not only does close reading create a distinctly different blood flow pattern in the brain, but it also activates diverse regions that stretch far beyond those associated with attention, in one example, even reaching into areas generally dedicated to physical activity. You may think you are sitting still with a book. Your brain does not.

As it happens, Austen has a particularly effective technique for representing a character's consciousness (or for creating the fiction that such a thing exists). Known as free indirect discourse, or FID, the technique allows the narrator to enter a character's mind and adopt the language of her thoughts while retaining the objectivity of a third-person point of view. It is like a special lens that can simultaneously zoom inside consciousness and zoom out and see it from a distance. An MRI machine records activation in parts of the brain the subject isn't even aware of. FID represents aspects of a character's thoughts that the character herself does not know.

Such immersion in a character is one version of what Natalie Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, and a co-director of the neuroscience study, describes as reading for pleasure. When she and her colleagues were first designing their experiment, they ran a pilot that put literature professors in the MRI. As Natalie explained to Laura Miller from Salon, "One thing we realized immediately... is that professors are terrible subjects!" On the phone with me she added, "We don't know how to read for pleasure anymore."

"And we definitely do not know how to do it in an MRI scanner!"

Brain Habits Caused by e-books

The New York Times published an article on how our brains form habits and lead to out-of-context behaviors. As with synchronization, our brain responds viserally to behaviors and images. Here is an excerpt of the article:


Last week, my brain played a cruel trick on me. While waiting for my flight to take off, I was reading The New Yorker, the paper version, of course — I know the rules. I became engrossed in an article and swiped my finger down the glossy page to read more.To my surprise, nothing happened. I swiped it again. Nothing. My brain was trying to turn the page the same way I do on my iPad, with the swipe of a finger. (I quickly realized that I had to physically turn the page.)

A few days later, my brain played another technology-related trick. In New York City, I hopped in a cab and told the driver, “59th and 6th, please.” I didn’t think anything of it when we arrived at my destination and I said thanks and hopped out of the cab, without paying. The cabby yelled at me bluntly, clearly not very happy: “These taxis aren’t free. Are you gonna pay me?”

I quickly apologized and paid him — with a good tip — when I realized that my brain thought I was in an Uber car, not a taxi. In San Francisco, where I live, I often use a car service called Uber when I go out for the evening. You order a car from your smartphone, it arrives, you get in, tell your driver where to go, and then get out at your destination. There is no money exchanged; your credit card is automatically billed after the trip, and you are e-mailed a receipt.

But I did spend a few moments standing at the curb trying to figure out if I was suffering from some sort of mental fatigue. I called the closest thing to a technology doctor I know: Clifford Nass, a professor of cognitive science and communications at Stanford University, and the author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.”
“Brains love habits; brains are built for efficiency,” Mr. Nass said, noting that I wasn’t sick, maybe just a little too technological for my own good. “Our brains are built to put two things together in space and time and then say, ‘Great, I can remember that these go together.’ Then we execute on that, like you trying to scroll down a piece of paper with your finger.”

Although videos have been floating around the Web showing 1- and 2-year-olds trying to use a magazine like an iPad, you would think a 36-year-old man would know the difference. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has performed studies showing that the human brain adapts to technology in seven days, regardless of age.


All of these brain changes hasten the adoption rate for technologies, Mr. Nass said. It’s what happened with the telephone or the use of cruise control in cars. “You no longer drive a car,” he said. “You use a car.”

What is now happening with reading, we will soon experience with paying for things without cash, check or credit cards. And it will happen quickly.

CBS: TV Spots More Effective Using Neuroscience Techniques

Although this Mediapost.com article from June 27, 2012 is not the type pf neuroscience application that we do at Syncsense, we applaud any effort to bring neuroscience into the media discourse.In fact, we disagree with the "neuro-compression" application indicated here.

Syncsense methods work irrespective of length of the content. You do not need to reduce "filler" and make your content shorter for it to benefit and work with our neuroscience method.

But here is the full article for your interest:

CBS will use neuroscience to help create promotional campaigns for four TV shows this fall.

By Wayne Friedman
Neuroscience has been in vogue over the last few years, bringing attention to the effectiveness of specific TV content. Much of the focus has been on TV commercials. Working with CBS, Nielsen NeuroFocus founder and CEO Dr. A. K. Pradeep has found a way to conduct neurological analysis' of TV advertising audiences in order to gauge effectiveness.

The answer? Reduce the filler -- otherwise known as "neuro-compression." This technology enables the most effective scenes within a TV spot to be identified and edited into shorter and often more "neurologically" impactful marketing messages.

Basically, human brains can figure out messages/storylines from just a few content segments.
“Our brains are so smart, they retain the key pieces of logic, the key pieces of the flow,” said Dr. Pradeep, on NielsenWire.com. “If you threw out all the fillers … and got to the core, it’s a lot more effective. [Neuro-Compression] ends up producing a better product.”

CBS didn't disclose what the TV promos would be or for which shows. But David Poltrack, chief research officer of CBS Corp., called the effort a "very exciting project" on NielsenWire.com.

CBS said the technology could apply for all TV marketers, reducing media buying costs by coming up with a shorter TV commercial/message. Plus, TV marketers could repurpose the ad through cross-platform opportunities, such as online, mobile and in-store digital displays.

Said Poltrack: “We believe that in the case of online and mobile, we’re in a new frontier."

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/177673/cbs-tv-spots-more-effective-using-neuroscience-te.html?edition=48465#ixzz28MQOV6Vv

Welcome to SyncSense Blog

We are very pleased to launch the SyncSense blog which will be a resource for research information in the field of neuroscience as it impacts video content.