The 128 electrodes atop my head aren't so much uncomfortable as they are unwieldy. They are wed to my skull via a fabric skullcap, anchored by a chinstrap in front, with a thick cluster of cables that snakes down my spine.
The cap measures electrical activity in various regions of my brain as I watch images of US presidential candidates flash by on a computer screen, hitting buttons each time I recognise one.
Meanwhile, cuffs on my fingertips monitor my pulse rate and perspiration as other sensors track my eye movements, following them as they dance across the screen, and gauge my pupil dilation to check my arousal. Thankfully, an electrode that measures micro-electrical charges in facial muscles, to reveal even the most subtle hint of a frown, remains tucked away in the drawer. Good - I feel enough like an interrogation subject as is.
And yet I'm not in Guantanamo; I'm in a windowless white room high on a hill in San Francisco, in the offices of the neuromarketing firm Lucid Systems. They want to get inside my head.
Lucid maps brain activity in an attempt to reveal the ways in which ads, images and messages stimulate unconscious thought. Moreover, it aims to use that knowledge to appeal to us at a reptile-brain level. The theory: before your conscious brain makes a decision, your unconscious has already acted, differentiating between various choices based on factors like memory, emotion, and whether or not an object draws your attention. By studying what triggers reactions at this deep level (which takes place in a mere 0.3 of a second), Lucid aims to help brands (and politicians) probe into our deep subconscious, rising above the din of decision overload that surrounds us. "You can manipulate conscious decision-making by manipulating subliminal primes," explains Stephen Genco, CEO of Lucid, whose clients range from soap marketers trying to make their product stand out on grocery shelves to top-tier tech companies like Microsoft, which contracted Lucid to study user reactions to its Live Search engine.
In my case, the button-hitting was just a ruse meant to distract.
While my attention was focused on the images of presidential candidates, positive words such as "leader" flashed on the screen faster than I could read them, designed to prime me subliminally.
The test was one of several that Lucid created to discover which works best as a subconscious campaign tactic: hope or fear. The conventional wisdom is that negative campaigning always works. Yet Genco says brain activity indicates the converse. Positive messages tend to stimulate our brains; negative messages cause a greater decline in brain activity towards the candidate running them than towards the target. In short, negative ads cause people to tune out the messenger.
Detractors charge that the technology is little more than a glorified lie-detector that generates colourful brain maps but unreliable results. Lucid's lab director, Wade Elmore, counters that although each uses similar tools to grab data, what they do with it is quite different. First, Lucid doesn't study individuals but results taken from many participants, and looks for correlations. It also simply looks for signals to detect whether certain stimuli trigger or suppress reactions. There is none of the subjective interpretation typical of a standard polygraph exam, says Elmore: "Lie-detection is a voodoo process to gauge reactions."
Yet there is a bit of voodoo to neuromarketing too. And although Lucid Systems leaves its methods open to public scrutiny, that's something Genco readily admits. "Companies like ours exist," he says, "because the people who want to persuade brains don't really understand brains."
This is just one element within Wired UK's special report on the new hidden persuaders. You can read the introduction to the special report here and a selection of the other articles here: - Data that define your retail options
How the TV watches you
When advertising gets in your face
Mining your mobile phone logs
Your unconscious mind has already voted
Now marketing gets sniffy
Neuromarketing is a go
Eye-tracking adverts
Your secret shopping personality
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
