Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

When we were young...

I spent a lot of my early teenage years in choirs, singing this kind of thing in the company of other, more musical boys. Actually spent a lot of time singing that particular thing again and again.

It's only 2 minutes long but it's 2 minutes of heaven, written by one of the great composers of the English Renaissance, William Byrd, sadly now largely forgotten.

Found it by mistake today. Downloaded to iTunes so I won't lose it again.

Beautiful. Spine-chilling. IMHO, anyway

Lie detectors and neurononsense

When I got home last night, I flicked open this week's New Scientist to find this stinging rebuke of Cephos, the Massachusetts firm trying to persuade US courts to adopt their fMRI technology as a lie-detector.

I've tried to edit it down but it's worth reading the bulk of it. Just keep asking yourself - how would this critique relate to the use of neuroscience in marketing?

Put simply: if proper neuroscience isn't comfortable with diagnosing this relatively simple question of lying in legal testimony, then how can we hope to use the same technology with any confidence for the much broader range of stuff we're interested in and make the predictions we want to extrapolate from these measurements with any assurance?

OK here goes:

"You will not find many neuroscientists celebrating...[at the proposal the fMRI scans be used as admissible lie-detector evidence in US courts]. Despite the company's optimism, the ability of fMRI to detect deception is far from proven. In particular, the technology has not been properly tested in real-world situations, where different kinds of lies and the diverse contexts in which they are told may elicit different brain responses. Does the principle behind the test - that certain parts of the brain work harder when a person is lying - apply in every case?

We don't know the answer because those studies that have been done on fMRI and deception have not yet been replicated. More research - and regulation - are badly needed....

...Whether the technology is eventually deemed reliable enough for the courts will ultimately be decided by the judges. Let's hope they are wise enough not to be seduced by a machine that claims to determine truthfulness at the flick of a switch.

They should also be sceptical of the growing tendency to try to reduce all human traits and behaviours to the level of brain activity. Often they do not map that easily. People engaged in demanding tasks have a tendency to show activity in a small region of the lateral frontal cortex, for example, but it is a far cry from there to declaring a neural signature for intelligence. Moreover, understanding the brain is not the same as understanding the mind: some researchers suggest that thoughts cannot properly be seen as purely "internal", but make sense only with reference to the thinker's external world.

So while there may be insights to be gained from matching behaviour to brain activity, they will not necessarily lead to justice in a court of law. The difficulty of linking particular neural structures with specific behaviour hasn't prevented lawyers from using fMRI as evidence that violent criminals have frontal lobe damage, though many neuroscientists are uneasy about this.

Similar problems surround the use of fMRI to spot deception, at least until it has been rigorously tested....

....The history of the legal system is littered with stories of technologies co-opted by lawyers before being properly tested. Let's not make the same mistake again."

Time to put the light sabres away, methinks.

Playaway

Over tea yesterday, Johnnie and I hatched a plot for an avo of improv games in London on Saturday 1st November

Say 3-6? Venue tbc

No agenda or objective apart from having some fun and playing games - just a chance to stretch our co-creative limbs

Everyone welcome - just let us know that you plan on coming.

We'll just make a small charge to cover room hire etc

And not a neuromarketer in sight...!!!

Hurrah!

PS yes, I know the picture's from Play School not Playaway but a long time since we've seen the gonk, innit

The Return of Neurononsense

Pic c/o Wikimedia

Just when you thought it'd all started to fade away 2 atrocious examples of the snake-oiling tendency bounce into my inbox in the same day:

First, Campaign (Download 3986_001) runs a deeply naive piece which demonstrates the kind of misunderstanding that the vendors are very keen to encourage:

    "..., neuroscience is an objective tool, which scientifically demonstrates and quantifies human         behaviour. It will have a huge impact on advertising...because it improves our understanding of     the brain how people process information and it reveals unconscious truths"

Now where to start with this nonsense?

i. the tool is a tool but so is my set of cristals (Joke!): the interpretation is what renders the "science" open to error - even the images the result of software's interpretation of data outputs and reconstitution as an image that looks like a brain.
ii. reading the data is hard because brain regions are not organised by single function: like so much of human physiology, brain function is both multi-purpose and distributed.
ii. reading the data is also hard because fMRI scans are deceptively approximate: the activity causes blood flow to active parts; this changes the electromagnetic fields so that the scanner can pick it up. The thing is the blood flow is much slower than the activity. It's a scale thing.
iii. neuroscience does not (that's N-O-T for the hard of understanding) "quantify human behaviour": it records activity in the brain (hence the name). Actually it records intermediate changes (e.g. bloodflow) that indicate activity in the brain.
iv. Behaviour is shaped by many more things than (conscious or unconscious) thinking - not least of which is other people (as modern behavioural sciences would have it). So even if the brain activity was properly measured and interpreted, it would tell us zip about what happens next
v. Thoughts are not brain activity. They are connected, clearly but because you can see some activity (reconstituted by software), does not mean you are 'seeing' a particular thought. Even seeing activity in a particular area of the brain does not tell you anything about what that person is going to do next...(which is after all the point).

Of course, neuroscience is helping us make general advances in our understanding of a number of aspects of human beings, not least unpicking the silliness of the rational economic agent and the information processing model that together have dominated bad market research for at least a generation. But it's far from being the precision tool for marketing that its advocates suggest.

And while Robin Wight is right to point out that "if we are driven by our unconscious decisions, how misled is an ad that focuses on the conscious mind?", neuroscience is just an inappropriate tool to help us with understanding the behaviour of a social creature. I'm sure that Prof Gemma Gilbert of Warwick Uni (quoted in the piece) is a lovely person but maybe the giveaway is that her speciality appears to be neuro-imaging, not in behaviour.

Seriously, folks: a white coat, fancy electronics and coloured monitor do not equal science. "Sciency" like Dr. Who's Sonic Screwdriver or the Memory Wipes of Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind maybe but that - as if I had to remind you - is just "'tendies" - it's fiction.

Science does things like publish the data and methods in peer-reviewed journals for peers to review. Ben shows you how to read this

But to be fair I don't know which are worse: the snake-oilers or the journos?

    "First, of course, we shall take on duff reporting: ill-informed, credulous journalists, taking         their favourite loonies far too seriously, or misrepresenting good science, for the sake of a         headline. They are the first against the wall" (from the Bad Science Manifesto)

And this wasn't bad enough, Martin Lindstrom is now plugging his "Buyology"? Perlease...

Update: I wonder if he knows that someone else has been talking "Buyology" for a while already. And yes it's in Marketing...

The Idea Village

One of P4G's first clients was the Idea Village in New Orleans.

They need your help again.

Go here to find out how to submit your idea

Jammin' wit' you

Pic c/o Practical Polly

OK. So you're a fruit-based drink brand

You've keen on natural ingredients and by extension, living a fairly unadulterated life

So what can you get your customers to do as the leaves start to turn? What can you suggest they do with each other?

Jam-making, natch

Hurrah for Innocent Drinks! Hurrah for blackberries!

Hat tip to Sair...

Influence and the wrong end of the stick

 

Pic c/o The great Armano


Influence is one of our favourite 2.0 marketing ideas: people and not ads, we say.

Peer-to-peer not brand-to-consumer.

People who share their opinions, people who make the rest of us do what we do.

(like ads but actually persuasive...)

Just occurs to me, reading (the otherwise brilliant) Jon Bell's post on the idea of the Google influence number that we're still missing the point.

We see influence (what folk do to each other on our behalf) where emulation (of what folk around us are doing) is the real mechanic behind the spread of human behaviour

We've just got the wrong end of the stick: we humans are not a species of "influential" individuals but emulators - Homo Mimickus. Like most social creatures, but more so...

Of course, with marketing's selfish concern about spreading "our thing", we find Influence - a push idea - much more appealing than Emulation - a pull one. It fits with how we want to see things.

But just because you want something to be true, don't make it so. Does it?

So let's give "influence" a rest for a bit, shall we?

Pass it on (2)

Lots of interesting response to the first episode of Jamie O's campaign Ministry of Food last night.

The Guardian is typical in describing  it as "the most powerful documentary in years" - but more for its portrayal of social deprivation than the campaign itself. The "broken Britain" being a popular meme right now.

For this and a whole lot of other reasons, I thought it quite brilliant. If you didn't catch it go here to see again

The great thing for those of us seeking to bring about change in people's behaviour is how Jamie looks set to learn how to spread stuff through trial and error - his own experience

Of course, he's got a lot right

1. focussing on what you can do not what you can say
2. ...on what you can give folk out there to do...
3. ...that they can do with each other
4. ...oh, and make it highly visible and oh, yes fun

But he's learning the hard way the things we've been saying about:

1. Spread is a pull- not a push-thing: you can push all you like but unless you get folk to pull the behaviour through, it won't spread
2. Things don't travel through populations on their own: lots of other things are intertwined (in this case, social deprivation, family structures, education, etc) and these can act as breaks on the propagation of your thing
3. Your agenda is not what matters - you have to make a difference to the agenda of the folks out there in order for your thing to be adopted
4. It is really difficult to predict what's going to take off - you have to try lots of things (which is good for C4 as we've got the rest of the series to go)

This is definitely must-see TV. His best yet, I reckon