Neuromarketing Our Next President Options

[Guest]

(from http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/003211.html)

As Matt Drudge reported last night, today's NYTimes has a front page
story on how UCLA brain researchers are using brain imaging to
understand how the brains Democrats and Republicans differ in their
response to campaign ads.


From the Times article, Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain:


"- The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as
their subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political
experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by
turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a focus group.


He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the
inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of
California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain. Instead
of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought
of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the
researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham's brain were active as he
watched. The active parts, they also noted, were different from the
parts that had lighted up in earlier tests with Republican brains.


The researchers do not claim to have figured out either party's brain
yet, since they have not finished this experiment. But they have
already noticed intriguing patterns in how Democrats and Republicans
look at candidates. They have tested 11 subjects and say they need to
test twice that many to confirm the trend.


"These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and
unproven adages," said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton
campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research.
"They'll help put a bit more science in political science."


In the experiment with Mr. Graham, researchers exposed him to
photographs of the presidential candidates, commercials for President
Bush and John Kerry, and other video images, including the "Daisy"
commercial from 1964. In that advertisement, promoting Lyndon B.
Johnson against Barry Goldwater, images of a girl picking petals from a
daisy were replaced by images of a nuclear explosion."...


"It seemed so last century," Professor Freedman said. "Consultants were
quoting Freud as if it was cutting edge. It was all about
interpretation instead of using new technology to measure what's
actually happening in the mind."


But then, after the Bush campaign commercial is shown, the subjects
respond in a partisan fashion when the photographs are shown again.
They still respond emotionally to the candidate of their party, but
when they see the other party's candidate, there is more activity in
the rational part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. "It
seems as if they're really identifying with their own candidate,
whereas when they see the opponent, they're using their rational
apparatus to argue against him," Professor Iacoboni said.


The neuroscientists warned against drawing conclusions until the
experiment was over. They said the results would mainly point the way
for future research, and other neuroscientists echoed their caution.


"Brain imaging offers a fantastic opportunity to study how people
respond to political information," said Jonathan D. Cohen, director of
the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton. "But
the results of such studies are often complex, and it is important to
resist the temptation to read into them what we may wish to believe,
before our conclusions have been adequately tested."