Can a Brain Scan Predict Your Behavior Better Than You Can?

It would be an advertiser's dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they've found a region which might predict whether viewers will act on what a commercial tells them. For a study published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers asked 20 participants to listen to a series of "persuasive messages." While the test subjects listened, researchers used an fMRI to record the activity in various regions in their brains. The study was small--but researchers say that, with these 20 participants, they could determine many of these listeners' intentions by looking at a region associated with self-consciousness, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The subjects listened to messages covering a range of subjects, but the team, lead by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, was really interested ...