Archives for category: brain

How Big Brands Are Changing Attitudes Towards Domestic Violence

February 1, 2015 //

Ultraviolet’s Super Bowl ad. ‘Credit to Fortune.com for the image.

In what seems like a tirade of response, big brands are rising to call attention to a long-stifled problem in human rights; domestic violence.

Domestic violence is estimated to affect 30% of women globally, with 2 women killed every week in the UK by an intimate partner. In Australia, it’s 1 woman every week – a statistic that has led domestic violence campaigner Rosie Beatty (2015’s Australian of the Year) – to draw attention to this urgent and disturbing issue.

In Turkey, it’s estimated a shocking 50% of women experience domestic abuse. So in response, Vodafone Turkey, with their local agency Y&R Team Red, developed an innovative way to reach at-risk female domestic violence victims. At times of threat, women can shake the Vodafone “Red Light” app alerting three contacts for help, and hopefully saving their lives. The most creative part was to reveal this aid to women only via heated Veet wax strips and YouTube female targeted ads to ensure usage quickly spread to the most at-risk groups.

And then last week, at the annual ad-binge that is the US Super Bowl, audiences weren’t talking about the plays, but instead about the team’s recent issues with domestic violence. In a hefty statement equal rights group Ultraviolet and Sports Illustrated launched the #GoodellMustGo campaign showing a violently crash-tackled woman. Not bad for an ad that was originally rejected.

But nothing could prepare the tuned-in crowds for the NFL’s own ‘No More’ official Super Bowl ad which aired during the game on YouTube. It’s been picked up globally by titles like The Economist, the Guardian, CNN, Fortune, Rolling Stone and many more, highlighting the disturbing content, which more shockingly is based on a real life story. Watch it here.

All this media attention makes us more aware. More awareness leads to more conversation. And talking about issues like domestic violence helps to break the awful silence for victims that allows it to continue.

To the credit of brands like Vodafone, Sports Illustrated and NFL, it shows that brands have a powerful opportunity to make a long-lasting impression on millions of people who care about things that last longer than the final play of the ball.

Who will be the next brand to be brave enough to step up to the plate?

Tags #GoodellMustGo, Australian of the Year, Citizen Marketing, Domestiv Violence, NFL, No More campaign, pro-social marketing, Rosie Beatty, social issues, social justice, social marketing, Sports Illustrated, Ultraviolet, Vodafone, Vodafone Red Light App

Categories brain, Citizen Marketing

How can Neuro Marketing can help edit effective content

January 29, 2015 //

Nielsen Neuro Labs’ consumer neuroscience and neuro marketing team has some interesting developments for anyone in marketing wanting to get a better edit on their content.

The Labs teams’ Fourier One headset is powered by electroencephalography (EEG) technology and is able to measure your audience’s neural responses to content via the brainwaves of your grey matter.

This means that now you can edit out the ‘boring bits’, (as captured by your yawning consumer’s alpha waves), and show the most effective area to put your call to action for maximum recall using eye-tracking technology.

This is the way to do “surgical content” says by Nielsen Neuro Labs president Joe Willke, and is certainly a groundbreaking development for achieving optimised brand experiences in emotion, memory and attention for digital and TV content.

This could revolutionise your marketing in product packing, in-store comms, and more. Find more information about Nielsen Neuro Labs here.

Tags behavioural economics, brain, brains, consumer neuroscience, consumer psychology, content testing, Memory, Neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, Nielsen Neuro Labs

Categories brain, Consumer Neuroscience, EEG, Neuromarketing

Neuroeconomics series part 5: How do we learn what we like?

September 5, 2014 //

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

Have you ever wondered why you like your favourite restaurant?

At the sight of it alone, your brain does into overdrive releasing its favourite yummy drug, dopamine.

This key ingredient helps our brain know what we like, what we choose to buy/do/eat etc, activating reward pathways and helping us remember and learn each time what we like and don’t like.

But how?

Dopamine neurons helps us to know our predicted utility – i.e. based on your past experiences, what you expect to get out of a good meal at your favourite restaurant. Is it the wine? Is it the food? Is it the waiter/ress??

However, when that’s interrupted, or the cue isn’t as we expected, (for example if we experience bad food, or poor service) then we encounter a prediction error signal – a readjustment – and our brain learns. See the red lines above.

We learn not to go back there next time expecting the same quality meal.

So it’s quite nifty really. Dopamine helps us to modify our expectations and consequently change our behaviour, allowing us to learn to make different – and maybe better – decisions next time we see our favourtite restaurant, so we also don’t keep making the same mistakes.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev’s course ‘Introduction to Neuroeconomics; how the brain makes decisions’ through the National Research University Russia. Available now as an online learning course through Coursera.com. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

Tags behavioural economics, brain, coursera, decision making, dopamine, Neuroeconomics

Categories Behavioural Economics, brain, Neuroeconomics, Senses

Neuroeconomics series part 4: How our brains know we want a sportscar

August 29, 2014 //

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

In this mini-series of Neuroeconomics, we look at purchasing decisions of consumers and how the activity in the brain can predict purchasing behaviour.

While some of us may think we don’t want a car, let alone car what type we’d choose, Susan Erk’s study in 2002 showed that in fact many of us can have extreme car category preference wether we know the exact brand name or not.

In the study she asked male subjects to rate different categories of cars – sportscars, limousines and small cars.

The brain activity of the Nucleus Accumbens (see below) was found to correlate directly to the car category preference; the more the brain reacted, the more they liked the ‘sportscar’, and the inverse was true for the least liked ‘small car’.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

The category of product alone was enough to strongly activate the NA part of the brain, and signal a specific purchase decision, regardless of the lack of a specific brand to consider.

This is an interesting insight into the potential powerful effects of marketing to associate values to general items and spur a purchase decision within a category alone. How much value do “luxury” brands need to carry if the category itself can carry them so far?

Tags behavioural economics, brain, brand choices, brands, car choices, consumer psychology, coursera, marketing, Neuroeconomics, purchasing behaviour

Categories Behavioural Economics, brain, EEG, gender, Gender brains, male brain, MRI, Neuroeconomics, science

Neuroeconomics series part 3: Our brains know what we want before we do

August 22, 2014 //

So far we’ve gathered that the level of activity in our Nucleus Accumbens shows our predicted values.

But can this can lead to actual financial decisions? Can we predict a person’s decision to buy a product based on their brain activity?

The answer is yes.

Our brain has an expected value – what it expects us to enjoy when it gets a cue like seeing our favourite chocolate bar in the shops. (That’s the point where we think “Yum that will taste good when I eat it”.)

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

And so our brain buzzes with excitement, and this activity in the Nucleus Accumbens, leading to a purchase of the chocolate bar.

Conversely, when people don’t buy it, the activity is less – as seen below. We’re just not so buzzed to pay the cash for the reward.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

In Brian Knutson’s study using fMRI to predict financial choices, subjects were asked to press a buzzer when they saw a cue in order to receive money.

When that monetary figure was $5, the subject’s neurons fired more, but when it was $1, it fired less. So when the person expected to get more money, the brain showed activity related to what anticipated gain they thought they would get.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev’s course ‘Introduction to Neuroeconomics; how the brain makes decisions’ at https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

Most interesting was that the neurons firing was actually strongest before the actual outcome – i.e. in the anticipation of it.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

So it seems we can’t quite help but buy that little black dress, great-smelling cake, refreshing cocktail or any other pleasurable experience we’ve had before.

We’re hard wired to prefer it, and act on that decision again. And again. And again.

Tags behavioural economics, brain, consumer psychology, coursera, dopamine, financial decisions, financial incentives, Neuroeconomics, nucleus accumbens

Categories Behavioural Economics, brain, Emotions, MRI, Neuroeconomics, science

Neuroeconomics series part 2: Where we make our choices

August 15, 2014 //

Nucleus Accumbens where we choose what we want

Our Nucleus Accumbens. Where we decide to buy that little black dress. Full credits to Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

In this mini-series of Neuroeconomics, we look at purchasing decisions of consumers and how the activity in the brain can predict purchasing behaviour.

So it turns out we’re all a little bit hard-wired for rewards.

We love a little bit of pleasure.

Our Nucleus Accumbens, located in the ventral striatum, does loads to help us choose what we want, when we want it.

It’s conveniently connected to the hippocampus (memory), frontal cortex (higher order decision making), amygdala (motivation and encodes potential costs of our decisions) and VTA which produces the all-important pleasure seeking chemical, dopamine.

So in short the Nucleus Accumbens (NA) is a hefty emotional calculator with access to good data to calculate values for our decisions.

What a perfect region to make some purchasing decisions!

Yes I love that car. But is it too expensive for my budget this month? And will it in my garage?

So how do we know there even is a relationship between our brain’s activity and us choosing pleasurable rewards?

Wolfram Shultz’s study in 2006 showed that the more the animal got their reward, the more the dopamine neurons in the NA fired. However, after a while they stopped firing when the reward was presented, and started to fire in anticipation of the reward. So it was expecting the reward.

Full credits to Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

So our brain learns.

Show us a cue for the reward – like the smell of a cake baking – and the brain releases our dopamine in pleasure-driving mode.

The cake needn’t be eaten yet, but the cue kicks us off.

What does this mean for addiction?

Exactly the same thing.

Self-administered drugs (e.g. cocaine, amphetamine) have been proven to hijack the dopamine system in animals and directly evoke a pleasant reaction by manipulating the pleasure system to mirror these expectant brain patterns.

So in short, our NA dopamine neurons will fire more when the person values something they know, even if they haven’t tasted it yet.

Tags behavioural economics, brain, cocaine, dopamine, Neuroeconomics, nucleus accumbens

Categories Behavioural Economics, brain, MRI, Neuroeconomics, science

Neuroeconomics series part 1: Why we want what we want

August 13, 2014 //

Neuroeconomics series part 1. Thanks to http://www.mybrainsolutions.com/ for the great image

In this LGM mini-series of Neuroeconomics, we look at purchasing decisions of consumers and how the activity in the brain can predict purchasing behaviour.

For those of you scratching your heads at home, what is Neuroeconomics?

It’s a ground-breaking new area of research that’s got psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists putting their heads together to try and understand the neurobiological mechanisms for decision making.

Luckily, everybody’s decision making process involves the same various stages: interpreting choice, evaluating choice, making a choice, and evaluating the results of that choice, all the while learning from that process.

If you don’t like the brand of cola you chose that last time, you will remember not to choose it again.

But if you did like it, what happens when your brain has to choose the next time around?

Well it seems your brain will encode a value to that cola, and that encoding will predict your decision next time you’re standing in front of the fridge (cool!).

Full credit to Vasily Klucharev at the National Research University Russia. For more information head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

The problem is, values are completely subjective. Someone who values diet might choose cola by the amount of calories it has. Someone who is on a budget will choose the cheapest. Someone aware of their image might choose the ‘cooler’ brand. It all depends on your values.

So Neuroeconomics has its own measure of values called Neuroeconomics utility – which measures the physical firing rate of neurons in your brain.

And this firing rate has a direct relationship to how hard you will work for rewards. The more you value something (like pleasure) the more your brain fires, the more you will choose to work for it. Make sense huh? But it can get a bit extreme.

Full rights and credits to the content extracted here from Dr Vasily Klucharev. For more information please head to https://www.coursera.org/course/neuroec

Olds’ study from 1958 showed how rats worked furiously to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain, increasing the firing rates of these neurons. In fact it got so high, they died from the fun. Yep, collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Similar patterns have been shown in humans where patients ignore their own personal hygiene and family commitments just to stimulate their own pleasure centers. Ew. (Portenoy et al., 1986).

So what is this pleasure center? Well it’s called the Nucleus Accumbens. And it’s full of that yes-I’ll-have-another-glass-of-wine-thankyou-and-okay-another-slice-of-cake, pleasure-seeking milk, dopamine.

But more on that to come in part 2.

Tags behavioural economics, brain, coursera, dopamine, National Research University Russia, Neuroeconomics, nucleus accumbens, Vasily Klucharev

Categories Behavioural Economics, brain, Neuroeconomics, science

New Little Grey Matters Logo!

November 28, 2013 //

We are thrilled to reveal the new Little Grey Matters logo!

Courtesy of Christian Hogue at Lost In Space – the same crew who did Coldplay’s ‘A Rush of Blood to the Head’.

Enjoy!

Categories brain

Why you make your Mum happy

May 13, 2013 //

Thanks to jamiewrites.blogspot for this image which reminds me of a very similar sculpture that used to sit on my Mum’s shelf.

In many parts of the world this week Mother’s Day will rightly celebrate a Mother’s love and dedication to her brood.

Given the many, many seen (and unseen!) tasks mothers do, calculating the hours of commitment and slog, and just thinking about the calamities of childbirth, the question does arise: where do Mums get their drive to raise a family?

Well, it’s kind of a drug. In fact a mother’s love for her child has an outrageously intoxicating effect on the brain.

Maternal love has been found to switch off the parts of the brain involving negative emotions and social judgement (in the right prefrontal cortex – that is, your right forehead area) and also deactivates the parts of your brain that produce fear, angst and aggression (in the amygdala – an almond-shaped structure found in the middle of your brain).

Maternal love also been found to switch on the very old, very primal parts of the brain that seek reward and pleasure and that are satisfied by in it the form of pure, straight dopamine – a very happy, “drive”-giving substance that gives exactly the same effects as a drug; pupils dilate, the heart races, and the body lets off streams of anxiety-quashing chemicals from just the hug from an offspring, or even by looking at their photo.

Interestingly for women, maternal love activates very similar areas of the brain as romantic love, with the exception of the memory area which activates more when looking at images of your hubby.

Also in maternal love, looking at pictures of your child causes your brain area associated with empathy to erupt in activity, (explaining the urge to take care of the infant), whereas in romantic love, empathy activity is caused in relation to touch (that is, women can understand the kind intention behind it).

Happy Mothers Day to all the women out there who bring so much happiness and buzz to all their children’s lives.

We can only hope we do the same for you in droves 🙂

Overlap between activity of maternal love and romantic love. Romantic love red, yellow is maternal. LPF = prefrontal cortex (involved in social judgement), A= amygdala (involved in fear, aggression), PC= posterior cingulate cortex (involved in negative emotions), OP = occipital parietal (involved when seeing things e.g. photos of someone you love), MP = medial parietal (involved in empathy)

Read this original study here.

Categories brain

Your brain is beautiful

April 3, 2013 //

Brain connection maps The Connectome Project

One of the ‘connection maps’ from the Human Connectome Project, which shows pathways in the brain.

I’ll bet you think the brain is an ugly, fairly squishy grey thing that’s best not looked at too closely if you want to keep your dinner down.

Not so. Check out this positively beautiful set of 3D images of the brain released recently thanks to the Human Connectome Project.

Using powerful scanners and magnets that could power a nuclear submarine, the US scientists look for tiny particles of water travelling along nerve fibres to trace the major connections within the brain.

This exciting tech combines US and European brain research to accelerate our understanding of – and vision into – the brain.

Like the Genome Project, the Human Connectome Project will collect genetic and behavioural data from the subjects in order to build up a complete picture of the factors that influence the human brain and best of all the data will be released to the public and scientists in the coming weeks.

Read more about The Connectome Project at BBC online and The Daily Mail.

A ‘connection map’ which shows pathways in the brain

corpos callossum cingulum bundles hippocampus MRI scan The Connectome Project

A close-up of the centre of the brain looking back. The large green paths are the “cingulum” bundles, which connect areas of the frontal lobes that serve executive function with the memory center, the hippocampus. The large red bundle going left to right is the corpus callosum which connects the left and right sides of the brain.

brain image facial recognition the Human Connectome Project

Yellow and red regions show brain activations in the grey matter when subjects view human faces.

maths reading brain image the Human Connectome Project

Yellow and red areas are activated by a task involving listening to stories. Green and blue areas are more strongly activated by a task involving arithmetic calculations

A complete cross-section through the front of the brain, with cingulum bundles at the centre. A reduction in the number of fibres in the cingulum bundle which may be an early marker for Alzheimer’s disease.

The brain pathways from an above view. The two green paths near centre are the cingulum bundles, and the two C-shaped green paths closer to the sides are major pathways of language, the arcuate bundles which connect the frontal lobes, where facial movements are controlled. The temporal lobes below is where sounds are processed, hearing interpreted, and utterances planned.

cortex frontal lobes cingulum bundles cerebellum MRI scan The Connectome Project

Side view of brain pathways, from the right. Far left is the visual cortex, connected by a large green bundle which connects to the frontal lobes. At centre, the blue vertical pathways serve voluntary movement, connecting the motor areas of the brain with the spinal cord and muscles. The green path at centre is the right cingulum bundle, here seen from the side. The cerebellum, which controls coordinated movement, can be seen at bottom left.

Categories brain

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