July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly
“Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.”
Imagine a high-reliability, non-invasive technology that can recognize your thoughts in real time. So, if you are thinking about “celery” or an “elephant” the technology could recognize that and use the information to drive any number of applications.
Exciting progress towards this functionality is reported in a post, Decoding Brain Activity, on the Brain Stimulant blog. Although very much in the R&D phase, the scope of thoughts that can be recognized and the reliability levels reported are very impressive.
Is the Ad a Success? The Brain Waves Tell All is another recent article in the New York Times highlighting the role of EEG measurement techniques in neuromarketing.
“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel”
Of course, there is nothing stopping us from using this technology in the design phase of product development rather than to test the effectiveness of potential ads.
The article mentions a firm, NeuroFocus, we have not discussed in this blog before and points out there are many presentations at the upcoming 54th annual convention of the Advertising Research Foundation that cover the use of neuroscience to drive the effectiveness of ads.
Neuroergonmics is an emerging field intent on combining neuroscience with human factors to design technologies that better fit our brain. Similar in spirit to cognitive design but more focused on the biological (neuro) then the psychological (cognitive) and narrower in scope (technology versus any artifact). No matter, it is an important related field and will get coverage in this blog.
The principle text in the field Neuroergonomics: How the brain works, describes the field this way:
”It combines two disciplines–neuroscience, the study of brain function, and human factors, the study of how to match technology with the capabilities and limitations of people so they can work effectively and safely. The goal of merging these two fields is to use the startling discoveries of human brain and physiological functioning both to inform the design of technologies in the workplace and home, and to provide new training methods that enhance performance, expand capabilities, and optimize the fit between people and technology.”
Not surprisingly, most of the methodology involves brain scanning techniques (EEG, ERP fMRI, Optical, trans-cranial Doppler) but there are also chapters on eye movement (link between neuro and cognitive) and most importantly (for cognitive designers) a chapter on “Brains in the wild” or tracking brains outside the lab.
There is an entire section on perception, cognition and emotion as well as a section that covers applications on brain computer interfaces and related devices
Neuroergonomics, with an emphasis on brain-machine fit lays a scientific foundations for work on the 5th level of cognitive design where the artifact integrates with or mediates human cognition.
I will provide a more detailed review each section of the book (with emphasis on implications for cognitive designers) later in the year.
