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mechanisms behind people's decisions in a way that is often difficult to get at simply by asking a person or watching their behavior," says Dr. Gregory Berns , a psychiatrist at Emory University. To scientists , i t' s all part of the larger question of how the human brain makes decisions. But the answers may be invaluable to Big Business , which invested an estimated $8 billion in 2006 into market research in an effort to predict sway and how we would spend our money. ln the past , marketers relied on rela-
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no one's scanning your head as you stand in front of the
beverage aisle or sit in line 刨出e drive-through6 • Instead , brain scientists are asking volunteers to ponder purchasing choices while lying inside high-tech brain scanners. The resu 1ting real-time images indicate where and how the brain analyzes options , weighs risks and rewards , factors in experiences and emotions and ultimately sets a preference. "We can use brain imaging to gain
in the brain system above and beyond the desire for the content of the can ," says Montague. In other words , all those happy , energetic and glamorous people drinking Coke in commercials did exactly what they were supposed to do: seeped into the brain and left associations so powerful they could even override a preference for the taste of Pepsi. Stanford neuroscientist Brian Kn utson has zeroed in on a more primitive aspect of making choices. "We come equipped to assess potentially good things and potentially bad things ," he says. "There should be stuff in your brain that promotes your survival , whether you have leamed those things or not such as being scared of the dark or the unknown. " Knutson calls these anticipatory emotions , and he believes that even before the cognitive areas of the brain are brought in to assess options , these more intuitive and emotional regions are already priming the decision-making process and can foreshadow the outcome. Such primitive triggers almost certainly afforded survival advantages to our ancestors when they decided which plants to pick or which caves to enter , but Knutson surmises that vestiges of this system are at work as we make more mundane choices at the mall. There , it' s the match between the value of a product and its price that triggers an anticipation of pleasure or pain. zero in on to direct all your attention towards a particular person or thing
(fMRI当 machine
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M∞tague
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of both Coke and Pepsi , then placed his subjects in the scanner, whose magnetic field measures how active cells are by recording how much oxygen they consume for energy. After tasting each drink, all the volunteers showed strong activation of
1) Wh at's your attitude towards advertisements in life? 2) 00 you prefer commodities of famous brands? 00 these brands stand for better quality? 3) If you admire a certain star , will you prefer the product that he/she promotes?
tively crude measures of what got us buying: focus-group questionnaires and measurements of eye movements and perspiration patterns (the more excited you get about something , the more you tend to sweat). Now researchers can go straight to the decider in chief the brain itself, opening the door to a controversial new field dubbed neuromarketing7 • For now , most of the research is purely academic , although even brain experts anticipate 也at it's just a matter of time before their findings become a routine part of any smart corporation's marketing plans. Some lessons , particularly about how the brain interprets brand names , are already enticing advertisers. Take , for example , the classic taste test. P. Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine performed his version of the Pepsi Challenge inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging