To demonstrate the power of tweets, Twitter’s ad researchers turned to neuroscience. Here’s what happened.

Twitter’s senior director of market research, Jeffrey Graham is always looking for ways to show the effectiveness of ad campaigns on Twitter — surveys, home visits, data models.

One of the more interesting studies involved two groups of people watching the NCAA basketball tournament on television. One group was permitted to bring their phones and tweet all they wanted. The other had to leave their phones outside and somehow manage without a second screen. Both groups had sweat monitors on their wrists and foreheads, a pulse rate monitor, and eye tracking goggles, to track how engaged they were. In comparison with the no-device crowd, the metrics went wild for the group permitted to tweet. “For people able to do Twitter and TV at the same time, there was a huge lift versus people who were just watching TV,” says Twitter’s global president of revenue and partnerships, Adam Bain.

But Graham felt that Twitter could really make a mark using a technology he learned about in an advertising research association’s report. It described how using neuroscience could get you other unavailable data, stuff from the subconscious reaches of people’s minds.

There was one obstacle. Using the standard method of brain imaging, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), would be cumbersome and expensive, never mind that tweeting while surrounded by a giant magnet could be hard to pull off. But Graham then found a company in Australia called Neuro-Insight that promised to measure brain activity using a much more manageable technology they call Steady-State Topography (SST).