What’s the difference between a dead salmon and a scientist? Apparently not much, if you’re scanning their brains. Craig Bennett, a post doctorate student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara, simply wanted to conduct test runs on an fMRI brain scanner in 2009 to confirm some settings and calibrate the machine. Armed with a dead salmon in place of a human, he put the fish inside the scanner and began running the tests. The data he found when finished was fishier than the salmon.
To his great surprise, the dead salmon showed signs of neural activity in both the brain and spinal column. How could it be that a dead salmon’s brain elicited neural activity strong enough to be picked up by an fMRI scanner? Scanners like his have been used to conduct scientific research since the early 1990s. Bennett’s discovery of this obviously false positive data has contributed to the growing speculation and uncertainty surrounding neuroscience over the last few months.
Modern neuroscience undoubtedly has provided alluring and important insights into our mental states and behaviors, and offers an attractive image-based model of our working brains. But these insights and images, it seems, may at times only be as live as the salmon in question. Some scientists and critics are speculating that a large majority of neuroscience findings are, perhaps, a bit fishy (pun intended) and not really findings at all…should we listen to them?
At a time when fMRI data is becoming more prevalent in daily life (neuroscience has been used as courtroom evidence and cited by the New York Times as having potential to save the humanities as “neuro lit”), Bennett’s false positive data raises important questions for the field. But we should keep in mind that modern neuroscience is at the early stages of development. Historically, many fields of science have gone through similar challenges as they evolve. Often these challenges are driven by the pressures scientists experience to make discoveries or fit data neatly into their hypotheses for publication. In addition, there are always limitations with early variants of the technology (in this case, enormously expensive and sophisticated hardware and software). For example, as others have pointed out, the field of genetics experienced a similar breakdown about ten years ago (remember the gene for intelligence or the gene for schizophrenia?), but has since established itself as an incredibly reliable, albeit complex science (for example, we now know that there are many genes and mechanisms involved in intelligence and schizophrenia).
While some of the concerns about neuroscience and its overreaching conclusions are valid, are we, perhaps, in danger of tossing the baby out with the bathwater? David Forbes addresses the marketing side of the neuroscience backlash, and how to move forward in his Greenbook blog, Beware the Brain-Science Backlash. From a marketer’s point of view, neuroscience offers up a more precise and scientific solution to the vexing reliance on subjective self-report, with its well established biases. When there is a need, new technologies are nearly always given the benefit of the doubt and are often initially praised with an undeserved enthusiasm. The prospect of new technology means hopefully, finally, the frustrating limitations of today give way to the efficient and accurate methods of tomorrow.
But diving headfirst into any endeavor is dangerous without the proper evaluation of the methods and their applications. Neuroscience quickly became the popular new kid in the scientific and marketing worlds, but not without its own unique, and often overlooked, limitations. Once instances like the dead salmon study started surfacing, the damage to neuroscience and the backlash began.
On point is the popular and much discussed book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Salley Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book slammed dozens of inconclusive neuroscience studies that spiraled into a broad range of areas including “neurolaw”. Many experts and laymen alike took Satel’s book as proof that neuroscience was actually not much of a science at all. However, the book is more nuanced than that as the authors admit in a National Review Online interview. In the interview, Satel asserts that brain-based explanations are becoming more prevalent, and this is, in fact, what is needed. “[Brain-based levels of explanation are] indeed the proper way to go when we want to uncover the workings of the brain for clinical purposes or to achieve new insight about the mechanisms of memory, learning, emotion, and so on… all subjective experience, from a frisson of excitement to the ache of longing, corresponds to physical events in the brain.” She goes on to explain that great strides have been made in gathering insights into human behavior on many different levels, including neurons, genes, and attitudes. The problem emerges when we ascribe too much importance to a young science that may have consequences of social importance.
Forbes asserts the reasonable notion that neuroscience does have a purpose and legitimacy in market research and beyond. The goal is to not overreach or claim more than neuroscience is capable of offering. Using “reverse inference,” or trying to map specific brain activation patterns onto specific emotions or motivations is just not credible (yet). We may have access to those powerful inferences down the road, but how do we now navigate neuroscience and, in particular, its applications in marketing today? The answer is carefully and conservatively.
We must be able to benefit from neuroscience without overpromising. At Innerscope and other consumer neuroscience companies, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Sands Research, a neuromarketing firm in Texas, uses electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive tool that measures electrical activity along the scalp, to measure consumer attention and arousal while watching advertisements. The ads that generate the highest EEG response are claimed to be more effective than ads that fail to do so. In a Super Bowl Ad study, Sands found that one ad garnered stronger EEG responses than ads had previously. That ad went on to generate over 6.8 billion worldwide views, 50 million views online, and increased both traffic to the brand website and North American sales.
In 2009, Innerscope published the results of its study of the 49 ads in Super Bowl XLII. Using biometric data collected live on the night of the big game, Innerscope correlated a key measure of emotional engagement to the ads and used it to show a strong and significant relationship with the number of views and comments online up to 9 months later. Importantly, the ability to predict the amount of online buzz using the non-conscious biometric measures was nearly double the so-called “gold standard” USA Today conscious measure of dial testing. This and other validation studies are useful in demonstrating the use of neuroscience in market research as potentially very effective and based on empirical evidence (rather than based on hype and hearsay too often associated with “neurobabble”).
At Innerscope Research, we believe that the brain and the associated human nervous system is a marvelous and complex entity that we are only recently beginning to understand in earnest. Overreaching and overzealous claims in the early stages of any science are common, but too large a backlash can hold the field back and be counter-productive.
We can liken this to the dot-com bubble and crash of 2001. Remember how the internet was going to “change everything?” There was an instant stratospheric valuation added to any company that added a ‘.com’ to their name. We would never have to leave our houses to shop again! Well, look what happened. It took another 10 years, but now there is no debate that the internet has changed everything, but not always in the ways that we thought and certainly not as quickly as we anticipated. Neuroscience is working in the same way. It has already had a significant impact on the way we conceptualize consciousness and how we measure mental states and emotion. It will change many, many of the ways we think about human attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors… but it’s going to take some time before the science and the tools are widely accepted.
Gary Brooks, a New Yorker contributor, emphasizes that neuroimaging is just one of many tools used in neuroscience. At Innerscope, we believe that many tools are needed to understand something as complex as the non-conscious brain and mind. Pinpointing a single region of activation in the brain cannot yield a conclusive emotion or feeling state that has a direct correlation to complex behaviors such as in-market sales. However, the use of multiple tools such as biometrics, eye tracking, facial coding and implicit measures applied in a thoughtful manner, can certainly yield valuable insights into emotions and behaviors that go well beyond traditional measures of self-report (with its myriad biases). Neuroscience backlash is only valid when tools and conclusions are taken in isolation and out of the broader context of the positive advances and changes that have already occurred and will invariably continue.
For these reasons, Innerscope has always been focused on a balanced interpretation of the science and on integrating multiple technologies and signals. We are measured in our claims, focused on validation, and committed to using multiple tools and measures, including the integration of traditional measures like surveys and focus groups, to answer our clients’ business question in the best, most intellectually honest and valuable way possible. By using the most appropriate tools in the most appropriate contexts with thoughtful experimental design, we reject isolated techniques and instead utilize a transparent and balanced approach to consumer neuroscience research to inform and bring value to our clients.
