March 20, 2017 by Kayla Stoner Cerf and Barnett test their technique on their own brains at the AMC Theatres in Northbrook, Illinois. Credit: Northwestern University

Through a provocative new neuroscience-based marketing research method developed at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, brain waves of viewers watching trailers in movie theaters produced surprisingly accurate information about how well the films did at the box office upon release.

Through the study, which included 122 moviegoers, researchers were able to determine what type of content is most engaging and memorable to consumers.

Neuroscience and business professor Moran Cerf and neuroscience Ph.D. researcher Sam Barnett developed a new technique using brain monitoring (electroencephalography; EEG). They measured participants' level of engagement with advertisements in real time by analyzing their brain waves.

"It turns out, when our brains are truly engaged with the content we are watching, they essentially look the same as one another," Barnett said.

Each film trailer was assigned a neural similarity score based on the extent to which viewers had similar brain patterns. Similar brain activity is a sign of greater engagement with the content. Higher neural similarity scores correlated directly with improved memory of the movie trailers and higher ticket sales when the films were released.

Out of more than a dozen film trailers watched during the course of the four-week study, "X-Men: Days of Future Past" produced the highest neural similarity score, was remembered by the majority of viewers and ultimately earned the highest box office sales. On the other hand, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" produced the lowest level of neural similarity, was only remembered by one out of five participants and generated a quarter of the weekly ticket sales that "X-Men" delivered.

The neural similarity method also identified the peak moments of engagement. Movie trailers that achieve that moment in the first 16-21 seconds had the highest ticket sales upon release.

Barnett pointed out how the neural similarity method could have helped "Muppets Most Wanted," which ran previews during the time of the study, reach its maximum potential.

"'The Muppets' trailer's highest engagement came too late," Barnett said, noting that engagement in the second half of the trailer was much higher after non-puppet actors Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell and Tina Fey were introduced. "If the production company had used our neural similarity technique in their focus groups, they could have considered edits to increase the engagement and ticket sales."

Neural similarity scores predict future sales with more than 20 percent higher accuracy, in this context, compared to traditional survey methods like focus groups. Measuring brain waves in the moment without interrupting the experience helps to eliminate the risks of insincere survey responses as well as recall bias, according to Cerf and Barnett.

"People are probably going to remember a trailer for movies like 'X-Men' or 'Spiderman' best because they are already familiar with the characters," Barnett added. "But with our method, we are not only testing their memory, but also how engaged they feel with the content of the advertisement as it's playing."

Through the course of the study, the researchers found that simpler content drove the highest engagement and neural similarity scores.

Complexity rankings were based on the total number of words in the movie trailer, the number of unique words and the variation in the image. The simplest trailers with the fewest words and cleanest visuals achieved higher engagement and eventually higher ticket sales.

Cerf and Barnett's paper, published in the prestigious Journal of Consumer Research, discusses the brain research method and its implications beyond marketing alone. Cerf and Barnett are also conducting research on how it can be used in classroom environments, sports stadiums and political campaigns.

"We can use this method to measure the effectiveness of any advertisement, speech, lecture, song anything you can think of where memory and engagement matter," Cerf said. "And we can do it more accurately than traditional methods."

Explore further: EEGs can predict a movie's success better then surveys

More information: Samuel B. Barnett et al. A Ticket for Your Thoughts: Method for Predicting Movie Trailer Recall and Future Ticket Sales Using Neural Similarity among Moviegoers, Journal of Consumer Research (2017). DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucw083

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Neuroscience technique measures how well films will do at box office - Phys.Org

If you've been online at all recently, you probably saw the sweet, hilarious video of the well meaning Korea expert whose interview with the BBC was memorably crashed by his two adorable kids. (If not, go take a look. It'll brighten your day.) It's hard to miss because it is absolutely everywhere.

But here's a question for you: in a sea of clips of kids doing funny things, what caused this particular video to become an instant worldwide phenomenon? Why did this one interview fail among all the world's interview fails go viral?

When something goes viral, it can feel magical. Sure, laying the groundwork by promoting your content, building a following, and studying past successes definitely helps, but as anyone who has ever tried to make something compulsively shareable can tell you, at the end of the day, it's always feels like kind of a crap shoot.

But now research is chipping away at that mystery by peering into people's brains to see what's going on when they decide what to share. Soon, scientists hope, they'll be able to predict what's about to go viral by looking at a brain scan. In the meantime, they're learning much more about the process of what makes something so shareable.

To figure out what is happening in our heads when we pass along a funny video or awe-inspiring article to our friends, a team from a neuroscience research lab at the University of Pennsylvania stuck participants in an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity while they looked at headlines and abstracts of 80 New York Times articles on health and fitness.

Each participant told the researchers how likely they were to share a particular article and also simply read it themselves. The scientists also had access to data on how frequently the articles were recommended in real life. By examining all this information together the team came to an interesting conclusion -- people use a two-pronged process to decide what to share.

Regardless of whether a subject was interested in reading an article or sharing it, two distinct brain sections were active -- one involved in processing social relationships and another in developing our own self-image. This suggests that the decision to engage with an article is based both on how that article will reflect on you (What does this article say about me?) and on recipients' interest (Will my friends enjoy it?).

"People are interested in reading or sharing content that connects to their own experiences, or to their sense of who they are or who they want to be. They share things that might improve their relationships, make them look smart or empathic or cast them in a positive light," senior author Emily Falk, said summing up the results.

This characteristic double activation could potentially be used to predict what people will share based on a brain scan. But it also offers a more practical lesson for those hoping to ignite a viral sensation. Sharing is a way to shape identity as much as it is a way to inform or entertain friends. Compulsively shareable content is usually a flattering mirror.

That video of the kids crashing the Skype interview, for instance, advertises your own experience of work-life balance struggles and a healthy appreciation of the absurdities of life with young children. Posting inspirational quotes marks you as a striver. Snarky wine-related memes in your feed demonstrate you're a clear-eyed realist in a world of inauthentic try-hards, etc.

For marketers, this suggest that until you can manage to install an fMRI machine in your office, if you want to know whether something will go viral, you'd do well to ask yourself a straightforward question: What does this content suggest about the sharer, and how many people want to project themselves that way?

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Neuroscience: This Is How to Make Something Compulsively Shareable - Inc.com

If the idea of physicalism is correct that all of our mental states can be described in purely physical terms then neuroscience is not only the study of our brains, but the study of our entire existence. Neuroengineering, defined as the application of engineering principles to neurological problems, then becomes how we engineer our relationship with existence itself.

Fifty years ago, nobody but computer programmers knew the personal computer was being developed, and the primary market for the device was thought to be scientists. Today, computers are a ubiquitous.

Digital technology has revolutionized nearly every facet of our lives. Today, neuroengineering is in a similar infancy. While most people would understand the basic idea ofusing engineering techniques to alter, improve, repair, and study neural systems, most people would lack for ideas on the application.

Dr. Ed Boyden is somebody who does not lack for those ideas.

ed-boyden-on-optogenetics-and-expansion-microscopy

As professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Boyden has launched an award-winning series of classes at MIT which teach principles of neural engineering, starting with the basic principles of how to control and observe neural functions.While studying neuroscience at Stanford University as a Hertz Foundation Fellow, Boyden discovered that human memories are stored by a specific molecular mechanism, and that the content of a memory determines the mechanism used by the brain.

His work focuses on dramatically improving how the brain is imaged, opening a world of opportunities for people who wish to study the neural pathways that make our brains work. Dr. Boydens high resolution 3-D maps of the brain, unlike prior 2-D maps, allow researchers to pinpoint exactly what part of the brain they wish to focus on.

Resulting from improved mapping of the brain, one basic application of Boyden's work includes better treatment for brain injuries by altering the flow of electric signals through neurons. Some of Boyden's projects, however, seem to enter the world of science-fiction:

One concept that I think is emerging is what I like to call the brain coprocessor, a device that intimately interacts with the brain. It can upload information to the brain and download information from it. Imagine that you could have a technology that could replace lost memories or augment decision making or boost attention or cognition.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - NOVEMBER 08: Actors Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr present Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute, Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Edward S. Boyden with the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences during the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on November 8, 2015 in Mountain View, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize)

A cyborgian improvement to my memory and ability to focus? The ability to save my memories on a disk like a word file? Immortality for my experiences? Anything is possible. Already thousands of people have something similar to this technology helping them right now, but Dr. Boyden imagines something larger:

Although over a third of a million patients have had brain implants or neural implants that stimulate the nervous system, so far theyve operated in an open loop fashion. That is they drive activity in the brain but not in a fully responsive fashion. What we want to do is to have bidirectional communication to the brain. Can you read and write information continuously and supply maybe through coupling these interfaces to silicon computers exactly the information the brain needs. My hope is that over the next five to ten years were going to get deep insights thanks to our technologies into how brain circuits compute and that will drive the design of these interfaces so that we can deliver information to the brain and record information from the brain at a natural level speaking the natural language of the brain if you will in order to powerfully augment things like memory and thinking.

Such engineering and interfacing may even help us better understand what our consciousness is at all. In a remarkably interesting experiment Dr. Boyden explains how mice can have their brains stimulated to produce some prettybizarre behaviour.

A group at CalTech has activated certain clusters of cells deep, deep in the brains of mice. And if its the right cluster you can actually trigger a mouse to become aggressive or violent. Theyll attack whatevers next to them even if its like a rubber glove, right. So the idea that you can pinpoint the exact circuits in the brain that implement these complex, even ethically and philosophically relevant circuit to the brain I think is starting to open up a new convergence of how brain circuits work in the context of very interesting relevant behaviors. You can also study diseases. You can, for example, turn off overactive cells in a seizure and you can actually shut down seizures in animal models with epilepsy.

Is this the darkside of neuroengineering? After all, if all of our mental states, such as aggressiveness, are just physical, neurological, states, then giving us the ability to alter one would allow us to alter the other. This raises a myriad of ethical concerns for any widespread use of the technology. While the benefits of curing neural disease, improving cognitive function, and the like probably outweigh the negatives, we must take great care when making such alterations to our mental states.

Is this the wave of the future? Neuroengineering our way to better health, self-understanding, and ability? If it is, Dr. Boyden will have given us the map to it, if we are careful enough to avoid the ethical pitfalls he notices on the way there.

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From Mind Control to Curing Brain Diseases, a Neuroscience Revolution Is Coming - Big Think

Prof Tim Andrews of the University of York: We can ask questions about the way in which the brain and the mind work. Photograph: Suxy Harrison/Suzy Harrison/University of York

How does the brain think? That is the question posed by a masters degree in cognitive neuroscience, which is being taken increasingly by students interested in the link between the brain and the mind.

And the proliferation of sophisticated machines, such as MRI scanners that can diagnose dementia, has created a need for trained people to analyse the information they provide.

Prof Tim Andrews, director of the MSc in cognitive neuroscience at the University of York, says: The MSc is designed to show students how modern techniques in brain imaging can be used to ask questions about the way in which the brain and the mind work.

Students at York gain experience in functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation. They also design experiments to learn from and explain the brain mechanisms that underpin learning and behaviour.

The course, which is also run at Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool Hope universities, is aimed mainly at people interested in an academic career in cognitive neuroscience in other words those who want to pursue a PhD and follow an academic path.

If you are interested in having a career in the field and asking questions about the brain, you need to understand how these tools that have been developed work and how to understand the data, says Andrews.

York has its own MRI scanner, which is housed in the York Neuroimaging Centre. The university is highly rated for neuroscience and has invested heavily in equipment, giving students first-hand experience of using brain-imaging techniques.

The University of Birmingham also gives students access to expensive kit and a research centre. According to Dr Pia Rotshtein who developed the universitys MSc in brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience one of the courses biggest pluses is that students receive two research placements, where they are able to work with international researchers in the field.

The masters in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging at Liverpool Hope University is only in its second year, but has already doubled its student numbers from five to 10.

Students at Liverpool Hope are able to use the EEG lab, which is on campus, as well as other labs that are located locally. However, they have to go into the city to use the MRI scanners in the University of Liverpools Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre.

Megan Kelleher, 22, has a first degree in psychology from Liverpool Hope University. She signed up for its cognitive neuroscience MSc to pursue her interest in the connections between the mind and the brain.

In the final year of my undergraduate degree I had the chance to take an option in cognitive neuroscience, which I found fascinating. In my dissertation I used neuroimaging electroencephalography (EEG) methodology to explore peoples emotional responses to familiar and unfamiliar kinds of music. You can see quite clearly how the brain reacts to different genres of music and which music people prefer.

I am finding the masters a challenge, but Im learning a lot. We have learned about the structure and functions of the brain and about memory and brain damage. One of the most interesting topics we have done is neural plasticity, which is about how the brain develops over time and changes when you are learning new things. Now we have begun to learn how to analyse EEG data, following up on the work I did in my undergraduate dissertation. I feel that once I have completed this MSc I will be able to call myself a scientist.

Science is now bridging the gap between psychology and biology, which were onceseen as separate domains. Having a masters in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging means employers know you are up to date and have conducted modern, advanced research. For my dissertation I hope to investigate evolutionary psychology, using EEG neuroimaging. After my masters, I am planning to continue in academia, either by taking a PhD or a doctorate in clinical psychology.

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Cognitive neuroscience postgrads: delving into the mysteries of the mind - The Guardian