Neuro-what?

There's some confusion about what neuroscience really is. It deserves a definition: essentially, it's the science of how our brains work. Neuropsychology is the application of this to psychological issues like memory, personality and cognition. And neuromarketing currently means the use of brain scanning, or electrodes, for marketing purposes.

These days, scanning technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) lets us understand how the brain works as never before. For a good introduction to brain science, try Rita Carter's book, Mapping the Mind (5).

Different areas of the brain can now been isolated - we know that there is a 'reward centre' which responds to the mention of sex and chocolate, while another part of the brain reacts to visual stimuli, another to audio, and so on. The industry of neuromarketing has developed directly from this thinking. Early on, some American researchers famously compared Coca-Cola with Pepsi6. In a blind tasting, those preferring Pepsi showed a far stronger response in one of the brain's reward centres than those who chose Coke. But once the volunteers knew which drink they were tasting, the re-scan results were completely different. Companies like Camelot and Daimler Chrysler are also experimenting with brain scanning technology.

But neuromarketing is not neuropsychology or neuroscience. Neuromarketing, via brain scans or electrodes, has limitations, many of which have been documented by qualitative researchers and marketers. We are clearly not all going to replace our tape recorders with MRI scanners. Far more interesting to most researchers is the application of learning from studies of the brain to our everyday qualitative jobs.

Given some thought, there are clear ideas that can be applied across the process - to recruitment, interviewing, analysis and interpretation. The focus of this paper is to show that neuroscience is not about electrodes on heads or whether fMRI scanning will jeopardise our jobs, but how we can use the latest findings in neuroscience constructively to understand people more effectively and deliver this understanding to our clients.
 

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