Scott Brown on How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot

Get ready for the optimized moviegoing experience, where every instant is calculated to tickle your neural G-spot — all thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, soon to be every director’s new best friend.

That's the dream of MindSign Neuromarketing, a fledgling San Diego firm with an ambitious, slightly Orwellian charter: to usher in the age of 'neurocinema,' the real-time monitoring of the brain's reaction to movies, using ever-improving fMRI technology.

From Wired

O RLY?

Conservative Ideals Drive Hummer Ownership: "A team of researchers has found that Hummer owners say their vehicle choice is strongly related to their personal morals...." (wired)

Dead Salmon + MRI = Red Herring

Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”
The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.

The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.

Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. (wired.com)

Duck and cover: E-ink

Esquire’s E Ink Cover A 21st Century Flop: "Esquire unveiled a special 75th edition today sporting the first use by a magazine of electronic paper technology, but what is presented as the future of digital/print convergence is little more than ink mashed with some underutilized circuitry." (wired.com)

Wednesday Coffee Break: The New Literacy

It's not that today's students can't write. It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways. (Wired)