Emotional response

Why ask people what they think of a product when you can just scan their brains instead? New Scientist explores the brave new world of neuromarketing

Read more: The results of our neuromarketing exercise are in

TAKE A look at the cover of this week’s New Scientist magazine (right). Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week’s cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. So we decided to take a good look at it – and try it out ourselves.

That is how several New Scientist readers ended up in a darkened room in London, wired up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine and being shown various magazine cover designs. Our aim – with the help of the European arm of neuromarketing company NeuroFocus, based in Berkeley, California – was to observe their reactions on a level that would not normally be possible. “I’ve been involved in market research for about 25 years,” says Thom Noble, managing director …