[Scott Bakker]

The brain is remarkably plastic, but it's a highly structured plasticity. The human brain does possess things like 'reward centres' that are consistent from person to person. Tremendous amounts have been discovered regarding the way all of our brains function given an ever increasing number of stimuli. And this trend is accelerating. I'm afraid the analogy to weather is more deceptive than illustrative.

The International Consortium for Brain Mapping promises to speed up this process even more, by providing yardsticks for various types of brain functioning, which will allow physicians to more quickly and accurately detect anomalies in the brain scans of their patients.

Till Susan Calvin gets around to building the positronic brain, taking samples from a hundred thousand people looking for presumed similar response patterns and then discovering common patterns does not surprise me. You will get what your search parameters are looking for. Nor does it surprise me that people are willing to assign qualitative values to those patterns. What surprises me is that people are willing to beleive that the patterns are predictive and willing to bet large sums of money on that predictive quality. As I thought earlier, better technology makes for better scams.

But there's no debilitating hermeneutic paradox in neuroscience as their often is, for instance, in psychological approaches. This is a simple fact. For example, given brain scans physicians can readily identify schizophrenia and alzheimer's, and so reliably predict any number of different symptoms a patient will suffer. They can tell you whether you're happy or miserable or amused or problem solving, and so on. With things like TMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation - they can reliably induce a whole variety of experiences, including OBE's and other so-called spiritual experiences.

Our brains are mechanisms, plain and simple, and they're in the process of being reverse engineered. It's all a matter of resolution and correlation, and the power and accuracy of these will inevitably improve as the tools and techniques improve. The more refined our knowledge of natural mechanisms is, the greater our ability to manipulate them. The problem with the brain is that whatever 'we' are, it's obviously utterly dependent on brain function. So the ability to manipulate the brain, which would be an undoubted therapeutic boon for those suffering neurological disorders, has a whole world of ominous implications.

[Hereford Eye]

What I know or think I know about the brain, I acquired shepherding a child through the teenage years. I see the brain as a system that must be treated holistically. Every time a function is "located" in an area, say speech in Broca's Area, we tend to ignore all the simultaneous activity occuring throughout the brain whenever a person speaks. Areas do not function in vacuums; they function as part of the system, and I find it difficult to wrap my mind about the idea the same neurons fire each and every time we speak the vowel "a."
An example of the kind of thing that bothers me about the analyses you describe, wasn't it just last year that the community finally decided that all that white matter that had been generally assumed quiescent was actually playing a vital role in all brain activity?
I am content to yield to your superior education in these matters, RSB, while reserving my right to skepticism. Spending ten years in daily contact with neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists while reading what I could find to help me understand what they were telling me about our child leaves me, after all, unimpressed with their successes. I will join their bandwagon and - simultaneously - support your alarm when they can point to their first cure of an ADD child, a bi-polar child, a schizophrenic, or - as our child suffered - from schizo-affective disorder.

[Dawnstorm]

The difference is as drastic as that between alchemy and chemistry.

Possible, but I'm not convinced. See, we're watching changes on the brain, but we're not trying to modify the brain directly. If neuromarketing were out to try and have us wear a grid where they can stimiulate the proper areas with the proper electrical impulses, so that we buy, buy, buy, then I would agree. But what they're trying to illicit is an action through an action; not a behavioural response to a physical stimulation.

Like Kant said, any inquiry is scientific in proportion to its use of mathematics. With this, marketing becomes scientific in the full sense of the term.

A little more scientific, perhaps, as the data gets more reliable. But one of the big problems in the social sciences remains unsolved: Validity. Do we measure, what we think we measure?

It's not like quantifiable, physical data has not been available up to now: pupil dilation, sweating, hormone emissions... Psychology has been working with those. They aren't arbitrary.

The problem lies with the correlation of physical data with meaningful activity. I'm not convinced that the OBC-method you outlined above is that different from other methods we have (especially, observation of actual behaviour), that is: a statistical trial and error method. We simply don't understand the way brain states translate to action.

The thing is, what we consumers think of the result is irrelevant, since it's our brains that they're interested in, and it's our brains that generate the behavioural outputs responsible for discretionary consumption.

But whether what we consumers think is irrelevant or not, that's the key question. Certainly, a thought-snap-shot is the expression of part of a brain state. A thought is a behavioural output as well.

It's, in effect, a black box model. Unless you can look at a brainscan and show me the thought, then the action and then explain the differences, all we have is interpretations of physical states.

When they start building a neurogun, I'll shift gear and worry real hard.

***

Edit: I can see it coming, this thread will leave me behind. 2 posts appear while I type one, and that's only a reply to a post 4 posts back when I startet typing (i.e. ignoring 3 posts). :eek:

[Scott Bakker]

Possible, but I'm not convinced. See, we're watching changes on the brain, but we're not trying to modify the brain directly. If neuromarketing were out to try and have us wear a grid where they can stimiulate the proper areas with the proper electrical impulses, so that we buy, buy, buy, then I would agree. But what they're trying to illicit is an action through an action; not a behavioural response to a physical stimulation.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the alchemy/chemistry analogy, but I agree with your general point. Neuromarketers remain confined to visual and auditory communicative stimuli, which places a huge constraint on their ability to manipulate consumer behaviour. But then, consider the degree to which we're manipulated already: we're hardwired to be extremely responsive to social inputs, which is entirely why corporations like deBeers are able to brag about instilling 'new cultural imperatives.' The amount of control they exercise as it is is terrifying... I think I see your point about the analogy now!

The problem lies with the correlation of physical data with meaningful activity. I'm not convinced that the OBC-method you outlined above is that different from other methods we have (especially, observation of actual behaviour), that is: a statistical trial and error method. We simply don't understand the way brain states translate to action.

I'm not sure how you came by that last statement, but it's simply not true. We understand some, and we're understanding more all the time. The previous physiological data (galvanic skin response, EEGs, and the like) we could gather was extremely low resolution, almost comically so compared to the neurophysiological data we're presently accumulating - which is high resolution enough to circumvent a good number of the interpretative pratfalls faced by the poor old psychologists. That's the difference, and it is immense, I assure you. I agree with you, the biggest challenge will be one of correlating this data to real life practices. To be certain, the over-enthusiastic will make numerous over-generalizations about this or that 'magic button,' but the real science will plod ahead, and those generalizations will become more and more reliable.

Not to mention, that we'll find ourselves living in a society whose dominant institutions pander to our conceits while treating us like out and out mechanisms.

The perlocutionary world.

[Scott Bakker]

I am content to yield to your superior education in these matters, RSB, while reserving my right to skepticism. Spending ten years in daily contact with neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists while reading what I could find to help me understand what they were telling me about our child leaves me, after all, unimpressed with their successes. I will join their bandwagon and - simultaneously - support your alarm when they can point to their first cure of an ADD child, a bi-polar child, a schizophrenic, or - as our child suffered - from schizo-affective disorder.

I understand your skepticism, HE, and I recognize that there's a good chance I could be over-representing the negatives of the situation, given that I've just finished writing a dystopic novel on the topic. In a sense I want you to be right, I want the distributed complexities of the brain to restrict us to handwaving for years to come.

But there has been an explosion in the amount of data in the last ten years - there's no denying that. Does this mean we've finally cracked open the black box? I think the answer is clearly yes, but until those results cache themselves out in some accessible real world context, I think I'm going to have a hard time making my case!

[KatG]

I'm more with Dawnstorm on this. The implications re politicians are rather frightening, because many segments of people who are actually willing to vote often have rather extremists views, and if they learn to appeal even better to those views, it will get nasty.

But the Madison Ave. stuff I'm not real worried about because Madison Ave. is usually pretty dumb about this stuff. Like, for instance, the stuff Dawn was talking about with the wrapper choice being the more effective strategy, yet the marketers choose the less effective questionaire approach. They also found that most people tend to buy whatever soda is on sale at the grocery store, rather than having brand loyalty, so the advertising of sodas is aimed not so much at getting people to chose that soda as keeping the name of the soda visible and in folks' minds. Hence big Superbowl commercials (even though choice of soda is dictated by what business contract with,) and billboards everywhere. Nonetheless, when Coke changed their flavor formula back twenty years ago, it was one of the biggest marketing disasters around. They messed up their own formula and destroyed consumer trust in their product because someone thought it would be a good idea.

For ads to be effective, they have to stick in consumer's memories, in a good way, that associates the pleasantries of the ad with the particular product so that the consumer remembers the product. But most ads, designed by the whizzes in advertising with their focus groups and whatnot, don't do this successfully. The Joe Izuzo ads were a big hit and made the actor a star, but sales of the cars fell during the campaign and it was discontinued. People didn't buy the cars because of the ad character. They have people whose job it is to design perfume bottles, the shape, color, and so on, to make them more appealing to buyers. But buyers are more likely to buy a famous actor's perfume because they remember the name of the actor, rather than caring about the bottle. That's a conscious choice, rather than an unconscious reaction to shape. Of course, they're being manipulated by the presence of the actor, but that doesn't take brain mapping to figure out.

Movies continue to muck up their marketing by either mismarketing dramatic movies as romantic comedies and such, or showing too much in the trailers, even though consummers have been complaining about this, loudly, for years. My mom works at Blockbusters and the marketing commands that come down from on high there are moronic. What they've found is that consumers are increasingly advertising savvy, and ignore ads because they are so used to advertising being shoved at them from every direction. To get consumers' attention these days, you have to come up with something really new or incredibly funny. And marketers are only now starting to figure out that word of mouth might be useful to them and should be looked into.

So, they're scanning brains, so they'll figure out how to control us? I'll believe it when I'm brain-washed. Back in the 1980's, the big deal was subliminal advertising. That was suppose to mind-control our irrational, sub-conscious urges too, causing us to buy a particular brand of vodka because the ad supposedly had the word "sex" in the picture. Only no one was ever able to prove much subliminal advertising was going on, and when they did actually have it, they didn't find any statistical evidence that it had any effect on purchasing whatsoever. Maybe lots of companies are doing it and we don't know it, but I doubt it.

As for neurological research, obviously all the stuff they're doing, and the gene mapping too, has enormous implications. But they still haven't figured out exactly why we need sleep and why we dream either. They still haven't figured out suicide bombers. The human mind is incredibly easy to trick. But just because you can trick it, doesn't mean that you can control it and it will always do what you want. Especially when you're not very good at doing the tricking part, which they aren't. I think there's a lot of hype about how we're all being controlled by advertisers and they can do this and they can do that, and we buy into it because conspiracy theories are fun. But all the stories I read seem to be about how advertisers are surprised that such and such marketing wasn't working, or were trying to figure out why a particular product was taking off with people. They seem rather clueless. So maybe if they do learn to map our brains, we will have to put up with a lot fewer lame ads.

[Dawnstorm]

I'm not sure how you came by that last statement, but it's simply not true. We understand some, and we're understanding more all the time. The previous physiological data (galvanic skin response, EEGs, and the like) we could gather was extremely low resolution, almost comically so compared to the neurophysiological data we're presently accumulating - which is high resolution enough to circumvent a good number of the interpretative pratfalls faced by the poor old psychologists. That's the difference, and it is immense, I assure you. I agree with you, the biggest challenge will be one of correlating this data to real life practices. To be certain, the over-enthusiastic will make numerous over-generalizations about this or that 'magic button,' but the real science will plod ahead, and those generalizations will become more and more reliable.

Wasn't clear.

For brainscans to be useful, you will have to come up with theories to how to make sense of them. Let's say you place them in a stimulus-response context. What do we have, then?

I would say, brainscans supply (by mapping differences between various consequitive scans) a response. But, unfortunately, it isn't clear what it is a response to. That's because a person is never limited to the test situation.

A neuroscientist named Read Montague at Baylor University imaged the brains of people drinking Coke and Pepsi. When they had no idea which brand they were drinking, there was no appreciable difference in the resulting images, but when they were showed Coca-Cola's logo, neural regions associated with pleasure expectation lit up in ways that Pepsi's did not - even when Pepsi drinkers were scanned. Montague's conclusion: that Coke's pervasive branding affected preferences in powerful ways.

Well, all we can say is that knowledge that this is Coke changes our enjoyment of the drink. Attributing the effect to "pervasive branding", however, is premature. There is a tendency to give credit to the visible action instead of analysing the invisible background. At this point, Coke has been part of "cultural discourse" for decades; a lot of things have been going on that are beyond the scope of marketing. Even if Coke was new, the effect may be due to word of mouth and socialising factors that have more to do with the right person trying the right product at the right time than with marketing (although, chances are, that this person wouldn't have tried the product without marketing in the first place). What we have here is not a conclusion (Cokes branding proved pervasive) but a question: "In what ways did Coke's marketing contribute to the success of the product?"

What does this have to do whith brain-activity and action? Simple: Stimulus - Response theories didn't take off in the social sciences, because they work with behaviour, not action. They ignore the cognitive activities that go on such as planning actions, reviewing and the assignment of meaning. What we do know is how brainscans translate to behaviour; how they translate to action, we don't. Because we haven't yet the means to describe "thought" in physical terms.

It's like Douglas' Adams "42": now that we have the answer, we'll have to figure out the question.

[Scott Bakker]

As for neurological research, obviously all the stuff they're doing, and the gene mapping too, has enormous implications. But they still haven't figured out exactly why we need sleep and why we dream either. They still haven't figured out suicide bombers. The human mind is incredibly easy to trick. But just because you can trick it, doesn't mean that you can control it and it will always do what you want. Especially when you're not very good at doing the tricking part, which they aren't. I think there's a lot of hype about how we're all being controlled by advertisers and they can do this and they can do that, and we buy into it because conspiracy theories are fun. But all the stories I read seem to be about how advertisers are surprised that such and such marketing wasn't working, or were trying to figure out why a particular product was taking off with people. They seem rather clueless. So maybe if they do learn to map our brains, we will have to put up with a lot fewer lame ads.

I have to admit that I find it difficult to believe that I need to argue this so strenuously. To me, it just seems obvious that when our society's most powerful (and pathologically self-interested) institutions turn to brain scans to better circumvent rational decision making, we should be deeply concerned.

Marketing has an immense impact on consumer behaviour - so much so that it has actually led to a reorganization of corporate America. I'm not sure how a list of nototrious marketing foibles changes that. Modern marketing constitutes the greatest, most sustained, propaganda effort in the history of the human race, swallowing whole swathes of resources and creative talent. It has rewritten our culture to the core. These are facts.

Marketers already tend to treat us like animals, which is to say, their primary interest lies in conditioning consumers, not convincing them. This alone should freak us out. But once again, the autonomy default makes us think we're immune. The fact that marketers compete for consumer attention, not only means the landscape is littered with failed marketing attempts (making it easy to assume that marketing 'doesn't work'), but makes it impossible for consumers to assign any intent to the system, the way they could some kind of 'Ministry of Truth.' They assume that a 'controller' is required for them to be controlled - which is certainly not the case. The system we have now is more effective than any centralized system could hope to be.

I would say, brainscans supply (by mapping differences between various consequitive scans) a response. But, unfortunately, it isn't clear what it is a response to. That's because a person is never limited to the test situation.

I understand this. I just don't understand how this is an insuperable as opposed to a practical problem.

What does this have to do whith brain-activity and action? Simple: Stimulus - Response theories didn't take off in the social sciences, because they work with behaviour, not action. They ignore the cognitive activities that go on such as planning actions, reviewing and the assignment of meaning. What we do know is how brainscans translate to behaviour; how they translate to action, we don't. Because we haven't yet the means to describe "thought" in physical terms.

As I said at the beginning of the debate, correlating neuro-imaging with real world activities is the primary challenge. But as I pointed out, this just means that a lot of good old fashioned research is required. There's no in principle reason why neurologically anchored consumer ethologies are impossible, so the safe inference is to assume that it will progress in the plodding, inexhorable way scientific research tends to progess.

As far as 'intentionality' goes, what you're posing as a problem here is precisely the advantage. Explicating intentional life is fraught with interpretative regresses - this is the in principle reason why psychologically anchored consumer ethologies were so difficult. With neuro-imaging, you can bypass the intentional altogether. Why do you think marketers are so excited? This offers them a way around all the bullshit psychological interpretation.

And this is one of the reasons I find this so unnerving. If marketers engage my thoughts then they're at least trying to engage a person, but if they engage my brain? This is the whole point, D - they're skipping us and going to the source.

The issue isn't whether they'll be able to turn us into remote control zombies. It's an atmosphere of ambient manipulation we're talking about - it's pretty clear they exercise too much control as it is. They pretty much sculpt our children (and studies show that children regularly exposed to televison advertising have a far different (and in many ways pathological) view of the world than children who are not). Most people live in consumer culture bubbles - you know this as well as I do! The issue is one of what kind of society we want to live in, raise our children in, and so on.

Once again: how should people feel about living in a society whose dominant institution primarily treats them as mechanisms?

[Dawnstorm]

Once again: how should people feel about living in a society whose dominant institution primarily treats them as mechanisms?

I don't know how to answer this. Personally, I find the idea of a dominant institution itself distasteful. I'm an anarchist at heart; unfortunately I don't believe that people are "up to it".

On this basis, I wonder what the alternative is to being treated as a mechanism. When dominant institutions treat you as a person, they usually want you to be some kind of ideal: a good Christian, a good citizen, a good student...

I, honestly, wonder whether I don't prefer being treated as a mechanism. The rock or the hard place?

***

I'll be back about "intentionalism". Can't think properly today.

[Hereford Eye]

This is the whole point, D - they're skipping us and going to the source.
Hmmm, the brain exists separate from the individual yet it controls the individual. Somehow, that doesn't sit well with me. I can hear the keys clacking already to tell me to pay attention to hallucinogens and narcotics and conditioning. The reply is that, when in these states, you are not you. At least, that's what the courts have determined, is it not? You may be responsible because you ingested the substance willingly, but you are not in control. Is that your point? We will become zombies controlled by the demons of Wall Street?
Didn't H.G. already write that story? And of course I am automatically reminded of the most marvelous book title ever: The Marching Morons. I know Lederer wrote the case in the 60s with A Nation of Sheep but he was wrong then and I suspect - or I earnestly want to believe - that this line of reasoning is wrong now. I have more faith in people and less faith in the guys trying to make it happen than to buy into the probability, much less the possibility.
The argument begs the question of "how do we think?" Haven't come across a convincing explanation yet. Flippantly, I am leaning towards the brain as a receiver tapped into a cosmic whole. But, that's a whole 'nuther discussion.