Remember those peddlers we got rid of in the last post? Well, their more traditional counterparts are working on some new techniques to help us part with our hard earned cash:

A company in Atlanta is scanning people’s brains with MRIs, in an effort to record our subconscious thoughts about products and ads.
The process has been dubbed neuromarketing. It’s being hailed as a giant leap in the science of selling. But the technique is also raising some concerns.

The Emory University School of Medicine is performing some neuromarketing research and a Nader outfit called Commercial Alert is demanding they stop:

Commercial Alert and prominent psychology experts sent a letter today to Emory University President James Wagner, requesting that Emory stop conducting neuromarketing experiments. These medical experiments on human subjects are unethical because they will likely be used to promote disease and human suffering.

Apparently they are using Emory as a trial balloon as this specific type of research is a wordwide phenomena.
Tyler Cowan thinks the concerns are overblown:

Furthermore the worries are overblown. Let’s say we found such a buy button and that corporations could use that knowledge in their ads. Would it really shift the marketing balance of power in favor of sellers? Over time I would expect buyers to compensate, as the knowledge would not stay secret for very long.

And a Forbes article archived by Commercial Alert agrees:

The rational response to the injection of brain waves into Madison Avenue is that it will neither revolutionize marketing nor make us consumer slaves. It will, rather, yield incremental benefits. “The human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe,” says John Van Horn, a research associate professor in psychology and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. “It would be arrogant to say we could stick someone in a machine and understand everything.”

And, really, you and I and everyone else is looking for the same magic button all the time…we just don’t have the money to fund focus groups or use MRI machines.