Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy

August 9, 2010 | Source: New York Times

The great hope of neuromarketing is to use EEG and fMRI machines to extract subconscious hidden information directly from people’s brains, bypassing unreliable verbal reports. Neuroeconomists now think of the amount of activity in the emotion-related limbic system as a sort of universal currency of desirability, allowing the brain to weigh up different rewards.