Bourree Lam: How did the book project come about for the both of you?

Steven Quartz: It actually originated in a query from Lisa Ling, who at the time was working at MSNBC on a show and was doing an episode on cool. We were working on a project at Caltech on decision-making and the brain, and thought it was an intriguing possibility.

Anette Asp: What is so interesting with neuromarketing and brain scanning is that the sky is the limit. It really has endless possibilities and we wanted to see if we could measure responses to cool products. And of course it was possible.

Lam: What is neuroeconomics and neuromarketing?

Quartz: Neuroeconomics was developed at Caltech around 2000, in part because we had an outstanding group of behavioral economists who had developed very sophisticated ways to investigate how people actually make economic decisions (in contrast to much of traditional economics which uses formal theories of optimal behavior). When we built an imaging center, it was an organic process of translating these behavioral studies to the brain and to investigate especially the unconscious processes that weren’t observable or measurable with the behavioral studies. Neuromarketing was the application of these studies to product testing, development, and consumer preferences in real situations.

Asp: Neuroeconomics is a way to answer questions about how the brain processes decisions involving everything from risk-taking, risk aversion, trust in other people, and so on. Neuromarketing on the other hand focuses on how we perceive brands, products, and status signaling objects.

Both tell us about the unconscious processes that a survey or focus group wouldn’t reveal. Often people don’t dare to reveal that they prefer Gucci, when the focus group is arranged by Prada.

Lam: How exactly do you conduct neuroeconomics research?

Quartz: We use the tasks that behavioral economics has developed—to see how people think about others during social exchange or strategic interactions—and further uses brain imaging to measure how the brain represents these values. We can look at very basic decisions like a simple gamble to very complex ones, like how people represent the value of products.

Asp: What is essential is that it captures emotional reactions in real-time as opposed to general rationalizations. When it comes to trust for example, it’s not always about how one might optimize the pay-off.

Lam: One question about brain imaging studies is that the sample sizes tend to be quite small. Is that a legitimate problem?

Quartz: We’ve done some studies with large sample sizes for imaging (upwards of 100 subjects), but the sample size issue really depends on what the question is. In neuromarketing it’s very difficult to get representation of the country, say, if you want demographic groups, age, gender, geographical location, etc. But if you want to see how a certain design affects the brain, or if the brain processes unconscious information about a product, that can be done with relatively small samples sizes.