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Effective Ad? Ask Your Brain
Science: Companies and health organizations spend millions of dollars on surveys, polls, and focus groups trying to suss out what people will like, buy, or do. But research shows that these techniques aren’t all that
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Daydreams and Working Memory
It’s the end of the day, and you’ve read the beginning of that article for journal club three times, but whenever you get to the middle of the introduction, your thoughts keep turning to that
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Two Flavors of Relief
Whether you just miss getting struck by a car or click the Send button for the final revision of a journal article, the feeling you have is the same — it’s relief. Yet even though
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Do Anti-Tobacco Ads Work? Ask a ‘Neural Focus Group’
Huffington Post: While watching TV this weekend, I happened on a gruesomely powerful anti-smoking advertisement. It featured former smokers who were missing body parts: a woman with missing fingers, and a handsome young man with
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To Avoid Stupid Mistakes, Think in French
Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Would you take a bet that offered you an even chance of winning $12 and losing $10? If you’re like most people, you would not. But what if someone offered you the bet
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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational
Wired: To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in
