Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Welcome to Brain Culture, where we ask how new insights into how our brains work may change the world around us and even the way we think about ourselves.
Now, this is not futurology.
If you've ever eaten in a fast food restaurant, your choices may well have been influenced by neuroscience.
Across the world, corporations and governments are applying brain science to help sell products and make us more compliant citizens.
Should we be enthusiastic?
Or maybe frightened?
In the 19th century, phrenologists said they could judge character by feeling the bumps on people's skulls.
Will future generations look back on our attempts to apply neuroscience and say it too was just a fad?
Or that it was the dawn of a new era, the era of brain culture?
To understand how neuroscience is being used to sell anything from burgers to politicians, I've been strapped up to an electroencephalogram, or EEG.
It's a quite rudimentary brain scanner.
I'm at the Brighton headquarters of MindLab, a neuromarketing agency, with its director, Duncan Smith.
They use brain techniques, like the one they're doing on me, to design a winning election campaign for this major politician.
One machine is measuring where my eyes are focusing, while the EEG is tracking my brain activity.
Fascinating, but how on earth is seeing electrical charges in my brain telling you anything of any value?
Unlike traditional market research, MindLab don't ask me what I think.
Instead, they try and read the automatic reactions of my unconscious brain as a more useful guide to my future decisions than my conscious thoughts.
It's an infant area of neuroscience, but neuromarketing is premised on the idea that we are unaware of the basis of even important decisions that we make.
You see, our brain makes them automatically.
putting people in the kind of shower cap thing that I'm wearing as I speak to you now, Duncan.
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