We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…

"About 95% of all thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our conscious awareness." -Gerald Zaltman, in How Customers Think This is a basic premise of almost everything we write about here at…

I recall the first mega-store that opened locally - it happened to be a Meijer store, though now Super Wal-Marts, Super Targets, and other stores that sell everything are common. It was interesting to watch what other shoppers had in…

We've discussed priming - the idea that an attitude or concept can be activated in an individual by subtle cues without conscious awareness - multiple times (e.g., Priming by Order, Priming the Customer, Thinking about Money) and others).…

Exciting new research shows that subliminal messages do reach the brain, although their impact on behavior has yet to be demonstrated. Scientists at the University College London (UCL) have found the first physiological evidence that…

Our recent post, Laughing Matter: Priming and Mirroring, cited new research showing that hearing the sound of laughter produced a response in subject's brain in the premotor cortical region, triggering an unconscious smile and apparently…

Mere exposure to money imagery can make you more antisocial and more greedy, according to research.

A provocative article in Seed by Yale's Paul Bloom, Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain, suggests that scientists are getting carried away with their reliance on fMRI studies....This is more than just phrenology. But it is not so…

A few months ago, we mentioned "mirror neurons", which fire when a subject watches another subject perform an action. If the subject has performed the action before himself, these neurons will duplicate, or "mirror" the, action in the…