Serendipity35

The marketing people have been paying more attention to neuroscience than many educators. Neuromarketing studies the sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses that we poor consumers have to marketing stimuli. Oh, and they are using functional MRI's to watch things light up in our brains, and EEG's and heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response.

OK, there ARE researchers using these tools to study how we learn too, but the marketing folks realize that surveys, focus groups and purchase tracking hasn't given them what they need. It might not be their tests. Sometimes we just aren't very good at knowing what we are thinking, and not very honest at reporting why we do what we do. (Case in point: all the current presidential election polls.)

A week ago, I didn't know neuromarketing even existed. I stumbled upon it on a blog at neurosciencemarketing.com.

A few years ago, I did a podcast series at NJIT about new majors that the university offers. Like neuromarketing, it was about the merging of fields. It's computational biology, biophysics and other interdisciplinary fields. It's crossdisciplinarity too - crossing disciplinary boundaries to explain one subject in the terms of another - the physics of music or the politics of literature.

I don't think this always needs to be a whole new field. It's what happens in classrooms on good days. Connections and crossovers.

I'd hate to think that the marketers are getting ahead of those of us in education in making those connections, but then I read what Nicholas Carr reports on his blog -

At McLean Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric institution affiliated with Harvard University, an advertising agency recently sponsored an experiment in which the brains of a half-dozen young whiskey drinkers were scanned. The goal, according to a report in Business Week, was “to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar.” The results were used to fine-tune an advertising campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels.

That is scary, and it's working its way into the curriculum. Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience + economics + psychology to study how we make choices. It's useful to know what happens in the brain when we evaluate decisions and categorize risk versus reward. Its useful to educators and useful to people looking to make a sale.

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and he writes that "all the machines hooked up to the Net are merging together into one giant, incredibly powerful computer - the World Wide Computer. Our own personal PCs, not to mention our cell phones and gaming consoles, are turning into terminals hooked up to that big shared computer."

I think utility computing is going to send equally big shock waves across society. In fact, we can already see the early effects all around us – in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in people’s growing sense of affiliation with “virtual communities” rather than physical ones, in debates over the security of personal information and the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, and in the growing concentration of wealth in a small slice of the population. All these trends either spring from or are propelled by the rise of Internet-based computing. As information utilities grow in size and sophistication, the changes to business and society - and to ourselves - will only get broader and more intense.

We are changing the machines, and the machines are changing us.