Brain Culture Part 3
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What is Brain Culture and why does Matthew Taylor focus on neuroscience and society?
Thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. The programme's off air at the moment, but brain culture continues here. In the third and final episode of his series examining neuroscience and society, the former number 10 strategy head Matthew Taylor looks at politics and mind control, asking if new knowledge about the human brain will allow us to make better choices or leave us open to ever more manipulation.
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?
I think the knowledge of how our brain generates our mind and our behavior is itself a fundamentally liberating body of knowledge. To look past someone else's skull directly and just eavesdrop on their amygdala or their prefrontal cortex and kind of see deeper into them.
I think it would lead to a picture of human beings as essentially the playthings of their evolved brains, not as conscious agents. And that can lead to extreme pessimism about the hope of changing things for the better.
So what we're going to do is we're going to put this cap on your head. And what this cap does, it looks a bit like a shower cap. It's got small little recesses, and in each of these recesses are tiny little electrodes.
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.
Duncan plays me clips of South American political adverts, though he won't let us name or play the ad on air of their politician.
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.
We're going to be able to pick up the electrical activity that your cortex gives off.
Fascinating, but how on earth is seeing electrical charges in my brain telling you anything of any value?
Because a lot of our decision-making, in fact the majority of our decision-making, goes on beyond conscious awareness.
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.
There is a thought that at least 95% of our brain's activity is subconscious activity or beyond our conscious awareness. So you were...
putting people in the kind of shower cap thing that I'm wearing as I speak to you now, Duncan. You were putting people in these shower caps, you were showing them different political broadcasts, you were mapping their response, and then you were feeding that information directly to the politician in his campaign. Exactly.
We were doing that every week for seven or eight weeks.
As a former insider, I know only too well that political parties spend a load of money on communication and they never really know whether it works. But by delving into the unconscious reactions of voters, MindLab were able to develop a strategy to boost a politician's emotional appeal.
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