Porsche take EEG marketing bollocks to the next level

The only cool guy who ever drove a Porsche. EVER.

The arrival of cheap, portable EEG (electroencephalography) equipment in the last ten years has been a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have initiatives like the OpenEEG project, which has democratised access to good-quality EEG hardware and software for researchers and hobbyists. On the other you have a huge proliferation of neuromarketing companies using the technology in (often) ridiculous ways.

Up until yesterday, my favourite example was this from Red Bull, who tried to record the brain activity of surfers with some waterproofed EEG gear. However, a video recently released by Porsche just took it to a whole new level. Porsche is the well-known midlife-crisis-enabling company that makes expensive toys for micro-phallused executives, but they clearly have ambitions to make a splash in the world of neuroscience with their latest stunt. Here’s the video:

…in which a test subject is first strapped into a jet fighter, and then a Porsche on a racetrack while his brain activity is putatively monitored in real time by a scientist. The claim is that pulling G’s in a Porsche is (nearly) as exciting as being in a jet fighter doing aerobatics.

There is so much wrong with this, that we could be here for hours, but let’s just pick a few of the major issues:

1. The video implies that the EEG monitoring is in real-time i.e. while the subject is up in the aircraft, or in the car. I don’t know what wireless protocol they’re using for that, but it’s definitely not one I’m familiar with.

2. They claim to be monitoring activity from the nucleus accumbens, a fairly deep brain nucleus, part of the basal ganglia, and a key component in the brain’s reward circuitry. Surface (scalp) EEG is really only good for recording activity from the surface of the brain (the cortex). I can’t find any human EEG work that claims to get signals from the nucleus accumbens, and I’d be very surprised if it were even possible (EEG’s not my area though, so feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong on this one!).

3. Even if it were possible to get signals from the accumbens, they claim to be measuring dopamine release. No. NO. EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain. That’s it. This is a flat-out lie.

4. The subject’s head is banging around like crazy in both situations, and he’s gurning like Bez in the 90s. As this video very clearly shows, you get huge EEG artefacts just by smiling, or moving your eyes around, so the EEG data they’re recording must be absolute crap.

5. The putative ‘scientist’, Dr Robert Van Der Linden, who conducts the tests doesn’t actually seem to exist. I can’t find any evidence of him anyway. Is this guy just an actor?

6. For the fighter jet segment the subject’s helmet actually has ‘Maverick’ on it, FFS.

For more neurotwattery see the accompanying website, which has the marvellous tagline “The cars that will stimulate your prefrontal cortex”. I… just… can’t even.

More eye-wateringly egregious neuromarketing bullshit from Martin Lindstrom

Martin Lindstrom is a branding consultant, marketing author, and (possibly because that wasn’t quite provoking enough of a violently hateful reaction in people) also apparently on a one-man mission to bring neuroscience into disrepute. He’s the genius behind the article in the New York Times in 2011 (‘You love your iPhone. Literally’) which interpreted activity in the insular cortex (one of the most commonly active areas in a very wide variety of tasks and situations) with genuine ‘love’ for iPhones. This was a stunningly disingenuous and simple-minded example of reverse inference and was universally derided by every serious commentator, and many of the more habitually rigour-phobic ones as well.

Unfortunately, it appears his reputation as a massive bull-shitting neuro-hack hasn’t quite crossed over from the neuroscience community into the mainstream, as I realised this weekend when I settled down to watch The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about branding, product placement and the general weirdness of the advertising world is generally excellent, however, it unfortunately makes the mistake of wheeling on Lindstrom for a segment on neuromarketing. You can see his piece from the movie in the video below:

Lindstrom conducts a fMRI scan with Spurlock as the subject, and exposes him to a variety of advertisments in the scanner. Fair enough, so far. Then however, Lindstrom explains the results using a big-screen in his office. The results they discuss were apparently in response to a Coke commercial. According to Lindstrom the activation here shows that he was “highly engaged” with the stimulus, and furthermore was so “emotionally engaged” that the amygdala which is responsible for “fear, and the release of dopamine” responded. Lindstrom then has no problem in making a further logical leap and saying “this is addiction”.

Needless to say, I have a somewhat different interpretation. Even from the shitty low-res screenshot grabbed from the video and inserted above I can tell a few things; primarily that Lindstrom’s pants are most definitely on fire. Firstly (and least interestingly) Lindstrom uses FSL for his fMRI analysis, but is using the crappy default results display. Learning to use FSLView would look much more impressive Martin! Secondly, from the very extensive activity in the occipital lobe (and elsewhere), I’m able to pretty firmly deduce that this experiment was poorly controlled. fMRI experiments rely on the method of subtraction, meaning that you have two close-but-not-identical stimuli, and you subtract brain activity related to one from the other. As in this case, say that you’re interested in the brain response to a Coca-Cola commercial. An appropriate control stimulus might therefore be, say, a Pepsi commercial, or even better, the Coke commercial digitally manipulated to include a Pepsi bottle rather than a Coke one. Then you subtract the ‘Pepsi’ scan from the ‘Coke’ scan, and what you’re left with is brain activity that is uniquely related to Coke. All the low-level elements of the two stimuli (brightness, colour, whatever) are the same, so subtracting one from the other leaves you with zero. If you just show someone the Coke advert and compare it to a resting baseline (i.e. doing nothing, no stimulus) you’ll get massive blobs of activity in the visual cortex and a lot of other places, but these results will be non-specific and not tell you anything about Coke – the occipital lobe will respond to absolutely any visual stimulus.

By the very widespread activity evident in the brain maps above, it appears that this is exactly what Lindstrom has done here – compared the Coke advert to a resting baseline. This means the results are pretty much meaningless. I can even make a good stab at why he did it this way – because if he’d done it properly, he’d have got no results at all from a single subject. fMRI is statistically noisy, and getting reliable results from a single subject is possible, but not easy. Gaming the experiment by comparing active stimuli to nothing is one way of ensuring that you get lots of impressive-looking activation clusters, that you can then use to spin any interpretation you want.

fMRI is a marvellous, transformative technology and is currently changing the way we view ourselves and the world. Mis-use of it by opportunistic, half-educated jokers like Lindstrom impoverishes us all.

Neuromarketing gets a neurospanking

A brief post today just to point you towards a couple of recent articles which pull down the pants of the neuromarketing business and give it a thorough neurospanking (© @psychusup).

The first one is a Q&A with Sally Satel, one of the authors of the recently-published and pretty well-received book Brainwashed. Sally makes some good points about ‘neuroredundancy’ – that brain scan experiments often don’t really tell you anything you don’t already know. Read it here. There’s also a good article on Bloomberg by Sally and Scott Lillienfield here.

The other one is an article at Slate.com by associate-of-this-parish Matt Wall, which focuses particularly on a recent trend in neuromarketing circles – the use of cheap ‘n’ nasty EEG equipment and (potentially) dodgy analysis methods in order to generate  sciencey-looking, but probably fairly meaningless results. Read that one here.

That’s all for now – I’ll be back with a proper post soon(ish).

Telegraph article on neuromarketing – dreadful stuff

I’ve so far resisted talking about a) neuromarketing, and b) how neuroscience is portrayed in the popular press, because I honestly felt that if I started in on either of those topics I would probably never be able to stop and there would just not be enough words on the entire internetz. Fortunately, an opportunity has come along for me to save valuable time and effort and heap derision on both targets at once.

Molly Crockett pointed me towards this article in the Telegraph, which is an uncritically fawning act of fellatio performed on Steven Sands and his Sands Research company. There are plenty of wince-inducing quotes in there, but by far my favourite is this little gem:

“It’s all very Minority Report,” Steve Sands says, referring to the Tom Cruise film in which a special police department known as “PreCrime” tracks down criminals based on knowledge provided by psychics. “But we’re not too far from that now.”

We’re not too far from having mutant humans linked together in a hive-mind predicting future events using psychic pre-cognitive abilities? Good to know, Steve.*

*Unless he meant the computer interfaces of course, which is generally what people mean when they talk about Minority Report. In the movie, Tom Cruise had to put on a pair of special gloves to do whizzy hand-wavy things with his computer; we’re already way beyond that.