Brain Whisperers: Cutting through the Clutter with Neuromarketing

Mark Andrejevic
1. Chicken Soup for the Brain
When the Campbell Soup Company embarked on a two-year project to redesign its iconic label in 2008, it took the high-tech route. If one of the best-known brands in the US was going under the knife, the surgeons were to have the shiniest new tools available. For Campbells, this meant bringing in the neuromarketers, who promised to sidestep the vagaries of focus groups by going straight to consumers brains. Innerscope, the neuromarketing company that handled the Campbells makeover, explained in its promotional material that because consumers initial responses to advertising are processed below the conscious level, traditional advertising research, which relies on conscious self report, is unable to effectively measure them (Innerscope 2011). Consumers, in other words, are a lot like suspects they need to be examined in ways that bypass the potentially deceptive character of their conscious and controlled responses. So it is perhaps not surprising that high-tech market research overlaps with cutting-edge surveillance and interrogation techniques. For the Campbells label redesign, market researchers relied on an array of monitoring techniques designed to capture somatic responses, including devices for measuring heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, facial expressions and pupil dilation, technologies familiar to those used in intelligence gathering, lie detection, and interrogation (Brat 2010: 1). The Campbells re-designers also employed focus groups, but that part of the project did not get the media attention generated by the neuromarketers. Indeed, the soup label redesign doubled as a
Somatechnics 2.2 (2012): 198215 DOI: 10.3366/soma.2012.0057 # Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/soma

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promotional vehicle for the nascent practice of neuromarketing generating a self-stoking spiral of hype: the media fascination with neuroscience helped promote Campbells and the Campbells story boosted the visibility of neuromarketing. In a Wall Street Journal article devoted to the redesign, the companys vice president of global consumer and customer insights said that Campbell needed approaches that would help it understand the neurological and bodily responses to an ad rather than how people thought theyd reacted (Brat 2010: 1). In other words, their bodily responses promised to provide a level of accuracy that their words and conscious thoughts could not. The notion that bodies are, for marketing purposes, more truthful than the words they utter is emerging as a recurring theme in the promotion of neuromarketing, which promises to render obsolete the allegedly quaint and outdated techniques of surveys and focus groups. As Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology, observes, Consumers will never, ever tell the truth . . . Its not because theyre lying because theyre not theyre just unaware (Tsai 2010: 19). Thanks to neuromarketing, the recognition that words may be deceptive and self-understanding awed does not leave market researchers suspended in a tissue of unreliable words. They can, thanks to new technologies, cut through directly to the underlying truths revealed by the brain. As social beings, Lindstrom notes, we learn techniques for performing our public selves to address the expectations of others, but at the level of brain, we are utterly sincere: We can learn how to react and express ourselves differently . . . but when it comes to the brain, you really cant lie (Tsai 2010: 19). Narrowly construed, in what might be described as its diachronic dimension, neuromarketing is merely the latest attempt by marketers to take advantage of the promise of new media technologies for the purposes of persuasion it is the marketing industrys embrace of the neurocultural turn. Vidal and Ortega (2011) describe the emergence of so-called neurocultures associated with the role played by the application of neuroscience ndings and techniques to a broad range of elds. These developments are, for them, associated with, the omnipresence of the brain as a major icon of contemporary culture from literature and the plastic arts, to medicine and the human sciences, theology and spirituality, politics and marketing; from emerging research areas such as neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neurolaw, neuropsychoanalysis or neuoreducation to an expanding universe of more or less extravagant neurobeliefs and neuropractices (2010: 8).

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Somewhat more broadly conceived, in what might be described as neuromarketings synchronic dimension the way in which it relates to other simultaneous cultural developments the emerging eld ts within a wide-ranging constellation of contemporary strategies for addressing perceived shortcomings in conventional forms of representation and the research that relies upon them. The appeal of techniques for bypassing discursive forms of representation (by cutting straight to the brain) takes shape against the popularised and reexive mediated critiques of discursive forms of representation for their potentially deceptive, indeterminate, and constructed character. In this regard neuromarketing, as a formation in popular culture, might be grouped alongside developments including the resurgence of body-language reading techniques, the ongoing use of implicit association tests in psychology, and even recent strategies of data-mining and predictive analytics that claim to be able to discern the desires and future behaviours of subjects more accurately than they do themselves. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in an age in which a reexive awareness of the performative and contrived character of self-presentation is combined with the proliferation of mediated narratives and messages that a premium would be placed on techniques for cutting through the clutter and bypassing the potential deadlocks of representation. This paper explores both the mobilisation of this promise and its collapse. It considers the opposition between the discursive accounts provided by consumers and the allegedly more authentic, underlying truths revealed by the technology. It concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the default of neuromarketing to the forms of representation it ostensibly bypasses highlights the impasse of attempts to bypass mediation. Nevertheless, judging from its reception, neuromarketing has a certain appeal for marketers facing the challenge of getting their message across to an information- and advertising-saturated populace. Although estimates vary widely, the consensus is that the number of ads to which the typical person is exposed on a daily basis has increased dramatically over the past few decades, thanks in part to the multiplication of media outlets and platforms for advertising. As the president of one marketing rm observed, Its a non-stop blitz of advertising messages . . . Everywhere we turn were saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention . . . It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement (Johnson 2009). The powerful appeal

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of neuromarketing, then, is its alleged power to cut through the clutter that marketers themselves have made.

2. Brain Appeal
That the leading edge of research on decision-making is headed straight for the brain is not surprising, given the recent surge of interest in the neurosciences. As Scott Vrecko has noted, the brain sciences including neurobiology, psychopharmacology, biological psychiatry, and brain imaging are becoming increasingly prominent in a variety of cultural formations, from self-help guides and the arts to advertising and public health programmes (2010: 1). Similarly, Ortega & Vidal describe, The rise since the 1990s of various neuro disciplines (. . . neuroesthetics, neurotheology, neuroeconomics, neuroeducation and neuropsychoanalysis) that conquer ground previously occupied by the human sciences alongside commercial practices associated with brainhood, such as neuromarketing and the neurobics [brain exercise] business (2007: 256). In response to the recent fascination with neuroscience, we are urged to think of the work we do on our brains as an important investment in one of our most valuable resources one that surely has the potential to be realised in other forms of capital. We are enjoined to maximise our mental capital in accordance with the guidance provided by those with appropriate forms of neuroscientic expertise in the name of our own self-interest. It is the combination of the structuring of self-help guidelines with economic (in the double sense of the term) strategies for guiding peoples conduct that results in what Rose calls techniques for governing at a distance . . . by shaping the ways they understand and enact their own freedom (2001: 6). By contrast, neuromarketers are interested in more direct forms of inuence in particular those that bypass conscious reection on the part of consumers. The promise of direct access (if not transparency) runs two ways: if fMRI scans provide direct access to consumers brains, they can also provide insight regarding how best to directly inuence these brains, and thus their owners. As the CEO of the Danish advertising conglomerate Bark Group, Inc. observed when explaining the companys investment in neuromarketing, As marketers, we know that emotions rule thoughts, and thoughts rule consumer behavior . . . By using Mindmetics new neuromarketing technology, we will be able to better understand consumer reactions and create messages that result in the desired consumer response (Email Wire 2009). At the centre of neuromarketing strategies, then, are

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claims about recent revelations in the study of decision-making facilitated by the development of new research techniques and the ndings they generate.

3. Brian Whispering and Somatic Markers

In the simplest terms, neuromarketing is the application of the latest developments in brain science to the goals of marketing: that is, Studying the brain to help advertisers tap into peoples unarticulated [responses] needs, drives and desires (Dahlberg 2004: 4). Companies including Google, Intel, DaimlerChrysler, and Microsoft have all incorporated neuromarketing into their market research strategies, at least on a trial basis, and the AC Nielsen company, internationally known for its media ratings services, recently acquired the Berkeleybased neuromarketing rm NeuroFocus to supplement its market research offerings, literally buying into the claim that, Great advertising strikes a responsive chord with consumers where it matters most: the subconscious. Only neurological testing can make the deep dive required to access that level of the brain and discover how it responds to all forms of advertising, in every medium (NeuroFocus 2011a). From a somewhat different perspective, we might describe neuromarketing in terms of the constitution of what Vidal calls cerebral subjects entities whose very essence as subjects is dened by their brain (2009: 6). It is easy to trace this understanding of the subject in neuromarketing discourses, which invoke the brain metonymically to refer to consumers of all kinds. NeuroFocuss promotional literature, for example, observes that, Great entertainment engages and delights the brain with content that is new, exciting, relevant, and memorable. Neurological testing allows producers to develop material the brain loves and remembers (NeuroFocus 2011b). The companys founder, A. K. Pradeep, describes his book on neuromarketing as a study of, how and why brains buy (2010: 1) not people or consumers, but brains. Thanks to advances in technique and technology we nd ourselves, so the neuromarketers claim, in direct conversation with brains, sidestepping the all-too-unreliable mouths to which they happen to be connected. As Pradeep observes in his description of techniques for monitoring the brains responses to marketing appeals: Measurements at this deep level of the subconscious are essential for companies to understand fully how consumers truly respond to their products, their packaging, their brands, their marketing, and the

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in-store shopping experience. The brain whispers those truths, and we listen (Asia Pulse 2009: 1). Although the literature on emotions in neuroscience is a wideranging one, neuromarketers themselves tend to trace the emergence of their eld to crossover publications on the neurology of decisionmaking by Antonio Damasio. For Erik du Plessis, author of The Branded Mind (2011), the term neuromarketing came into vogue . . . against the background of fMRIs popularity and Damasios theorem (p. 171). Indeed, du Plessiss entire book is structured around his interpretation of Damasios work. Of particular interest to du Plessis and to the popular literature on neuromarketing more generally (including, for example, Lindstroms Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why we Buy (2010); Zurawickis Neuromarketing (2010); and Renvoise s Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customers Brain (2007)) is Damasios hypothesis that emotional responses serve as short-hand for incorporating remembered associations into the process of rational decision-making. Rather than portraying emotions as opposed to reason, Damasio argues that reason cannot function properly without the pre-screening of various alternatives provided by emotion. As du Plessis puts it, we have seen emotions as something that interfered with rationality. Damasio changed the whole paradigm by positing, I have emotions, therefore I am rational (2011: 4). The signicance of the paradigm shift du Plessis attributes to Damasio is not specically elaborated, but it emerges against the background concern about information overload or message clutter in the marketing industry and in literature on the information society more broadly (see, for example, Shenks Data Smog (1997) and Weinbergers Too Big To Know (2012)). For neuromarketers, the important aspect of Damasios reconguration of the relationship between reason and emotion is that it addresses the need to process information quickly in a context of message overload. As Lindstrom puts it, drawing on Damasios theory of somatic markers, emotional responses serve as:
a kind of bookmark, or shortcut, in our brains. Sown by past experiences of reward and punishment, these markers serve to connect an experience or emotion with a specic, required reaction. By instantaneously helping us narrow down the possibilities available in a situation, they shepherd us toward a decision. (2010: 31)

Damasio describes the physical markers of the emotional responses that facilitate the decision-making process as somatic markers that play an invaluable role in the process of rational

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deliberation. These visceral responses, as Damasio puts it, have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios (1995: 174). He suggests that our bodies store these links in the form of embodied responses that can intervene in the deliberation process by helping to direct us towards particular alternatives and away from others:
Imagine that before you apply any kind of cost/benet analysis to the premises [of a particular decision], and before you reason toward the solution of the problem, something quite important happens: When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however eetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. (1995: 173)

The somatic marker hypothesis envisions a form of embodied cognition whereby responses are recorded, stored, and replayed subconsciously, bypassing the slower route of conscious, rational deliberation. Drawing on the work of Joseph LeDoux (another signicant gure in the neuromarketing literature), Lerner puts it this way: every feeling is really a summary of data, a visceral response to all of the information that cant be accessed directly feelings are an accurate shortcut, a concise expression of decades worth of experience (2009: 23). In marketing terms, the theory of somatic markers reframes the character of emotional appeals perhaps another of its selling points. As long as emotional appeals are portrayed as threats to the exercise of reason, their use by marketers can be framed as a challenge to ideals of personal autonomy, rational-critical deliberation and the forms of citizenship with which these are associated. In what Damasio describes as the high-reason view of decision making, the assumption is that reason operates in a realm aloof from (if occasionally overwhelmed by) the passions associated with emotion. According to this view,
Formal logic will, by itself, get us to the best available solution for any problem. An important aspect of the rationalist conception is that to obtain the best results, emotions must be kept out. Rational processing must be unencumbered by passion. (1995: 171)

This is not to say that emotions do not interfere in the decisionmaking process rather they are to be understood as just that: a form of interference in (or contamination of) the operation of pure reason.

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Against this background, marketing strategies, which have long relied on the power of emotional appeals and strategies for making these as effective as possible (Marchand 1986; Ewen 2001), appear to threaten high reason and the values associated with it. If, by contrast, emotions can be framed as adjuncts to reason on the same side, rather than pitted against it soliciting them no longer poses the same threat. In this regard, the new paradigm du Plessis associates with Damasio performs public relations work for the marketing industry itself: yes, marketing can still be portrayed as an attempt to inuence, perhaps even to manipulate, but not as an outright challenge to the reasoning subject. Rather, such appeals can be framed as adjusting to the forms of (rational) cognition best suited to a rapidly changing information environment. Along these lines, another line of research associated with Damasio is repeatedly invoked in the neuromarketing literature: the so-called Iowa Gambling Task that he helped to design. The task purportedly reveals the power of rapid somatic forms of pre-conscious cognition. Participants equipped with stress detectors (that measure skin conductance) gambled for play money by drawing from four secretly rigged decks of cards: two that offered higher payoffs and losses but resulted in overall losses and two decks with smaller payouts that nonetheless led to gains over time. The researchers discovered that it took the players an average of about 50 cards before they started drawing only from the protable decks and about 30 cards more before they could explain why. However, their stress levels, as measured by their physiological responses, increased when they reached for the losing decks after only about ten cards. As Lerner puts it, The emotions knew which decks were dangerous. The subjects feelings gured out the game rst (2009: 47). Gladwell (2005) draws on this experiment to describe what he calls the process of rapid cognition or thinking without thinking: a system in which the brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that its reaching conclusions (2005: 10). The emotional response in this instance was portrayed not only as rational but also as a much more efcient form of cognition. By extension, carefully crafted emotional appeals can be portrayed not as an assault on reason, but as overtures to the form of rationality best suited to an era in which thinking without thinking is recognised as a useful and powerful form of reason-abetting cognition. For du Plessis, this is perhaps the most signicant aspect of Damasios theory of somatic markers: it licenses marketers ongoing interest in the power of emotional appeals, but reframes this power as facilitating rather than usurping the use of reason. As he puts it, this is where we

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start to understand the new paradigm of feelings where feelings are not bad things, but things that drive decision making (2012: 173) and by this, he means rational decision making (presumably the good kind, because not inuenced by bad things).

4. From Causation to Correlation

The reconguration of the relationship of reason and emotion outlined by Damasio does not, on its own, give us neuromarketing. For du Plessis and Zurawicki, this emerging realm of marketing research results from the conjunction of the theory of somatic markers with the development of fMRI technology and the increasing use of biometrics (including EEG and, for some neuromarketers, skin conductance, eye tracking and expression recognition technology) for marketing purposes. Thanks to these developments, they suggest, the study of the emotional component of consumer decision making can become an empirical science rather than a matter of psychological theory and speculation. If, once upon a time, marketing to consumers meant tapping into deep subconscious desires, selling to brains, by contrast, ends up being something a bit more physiological. Neuromarketing treats consumers as bundles of nerve centres that respond to different kinds of stimuli and form triggerable pathways as a result. As one account in The Wall Street Journal put it,
Years ago, Revlon founder Charles Revlon drily observed that in the factory, we make perfume; in the store we sell hope . . . Neuromarketing can now pinpoint where in our brain such hope is triggered and tell a marketer which ad campaign will send the most blood there. (Stark 2008)

If marketing to consumers is an uncertain business, going directly to their nerve centres promises to be less so. Viewed through the lens of neuromarketing, these bundles of nerves become, as marketing guru Martin Lindstrom puts it, the core of our truest selves: the part of us that yields up the truth of our desire more accurately and objectively than consciously articulated thoughts or psychological interpretations (Stark 2008). Neuromarketing promises not simply to provide clues about how best to directly inuence the emotional triggers that allegedly shape subconscious consumer cognition, but also to allow marketers themselves to bypass the welter of potentially inaccurate research data (including our own misleading accounts of our preferences) that

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threatens to conceal our truest selves from them. The paradox of savvy reexivity recurs in this formulation, which pairs a deep mistrust of mediation with a seemingly na ve faith in that most mediated of artifacts: the red blot on the fMRI scan. The paradox of the decline of symbolic efciency results in what Zizek describes as a resurgent form of fundamentalism: what is foreclosed in the symbolic (belief) returns in the Real (of a direct knowledge). A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly (2004: 31). It turns out that, according to neuromarketers, the primary threat to such unadulterated and direct forms of knowledge is posed by sociality and, consequently, language and consciousness. NeuroFocus founder A. K. Pradeep claims that language too often mistranslates the impulses of our truest selves:
When you ask someone about how they felt or what they thought or what they remember about something, in the process of replying their brain actually changes the original information it recorded. In contrast, when you measure at the subconscious, precognitive level of the brain, youre accessing the original information immediately following its reception, before it can be distorted by all the factors that can inuence articulated responses, from cultural and language differences to education levels and many more. (PR Newswire 2009)

If, on this account, consciousness is the realm of delusion and sociality that of distortion neuromarketing captures the essence of desire before it is released into the world, while it is still locked up, in its essential form. Although the language of neuromarketing seems to recapitulate a logic of depth by mobilising the promise to excavate below the surface of discourse into the recesses of the reptilian brain, this formulation turns out to be self-misreading on the part of neuromarketers. Far from providing underlying explanations for the functioning of emotional cognition (in the register of psychoanalysis), or even of the brains inner workings (in the register of structural physiology), neuromarketing research invokes the power of correlation an increasingly familiar one in the data-driven world of contemporary market research. Consider, for example, the ndings of a recent study of brain responses to popular music. In 2006, researchers at Emory University scanned 27 teenagers while they listened to short clips of more than 100 then-unknown songs. They then ranked the songs according to those which lit up what they described as regions of the brain associated with pleasure and reward. Several years later, they returned

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to their research and discovered that half of the songs on their neural top-10 list had gone on to become hits. The ndings led a Stanford marketing professor to proclaim the triumph of neuromarketing: brain activation is able to predict what music is going to become popular two or three years from now (Hotz 2011). The study said nothing about the psychological appeal of the songs, or even about why these songs might have yielded scans indicating activity in certain parts of the brain. Nor did the ndings reveal whether those who were scanned had gone on to purchase the songs to which their brains had apparently responded. The key nding in this instance was purely correlational. A neuro-economist, who worked on the project at Emorys Center for Neuropolicy, noted that even though the researchers couldnt explain why, The punch line is that brain responses correlated with units sold, making the nucleus accumbens (one of the brain regions where activation was measured), an effective focus group (Hotz 2011). Indeed, it turned out that the brain activation measurements were more accurate in predicting sales than the teens stated preferences. For the purposes of marketers, correlation is all that is needed. If Vance Packard, writing in the heyday of psychological approaches to marketing in The Hidden Persuaders, described the activities of those who were known in the trade as the depth boys (1980: 23), we might describe the new generation of neuromarketers as the correlation kids or the data diviners. The promise of neuromarketing is, in a sense, to black-box the problem of causality. Who cares why a particular blend of colours or sounds activates a consumers brain, what matters is that it does and that this activation can, at least in some cases, be correlated with sales. This fact was driven home to me during a visit to a San Diego company called MindSign, which boasted, at the time, the only freestanding (non-institutionally-afliated) fMRI machine in the United States. The entrepreneurs at MindSign were working on a variety of projects, including the use of their fMRI machine for lie detection and for exploring viewers (brains) responses to movies in real time. At the time of my visit, the researchers at MindSign were in the process of conducting an experiment to see whether they could use brain scans to predict short-term consumption behaviour. This meant exposing test subjects to a range of brands and then checking back several days later to see whether they had purchased any of the products in question. Once the data was collected, the researchers planned to search for retroactive correlations, to see whether anything in the scans could be used to predict whether subsequent consumption would take place.

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The goal was not to explain, but merely to predict, based on pure induction from the data. Causation was not, however, entirely absent from the picture: MindSigns eventual goal was to determine whether it might be possible to cause, via marketing appeals, a brand identity that would trigger brain activity correlated with consumption behaviour but without needing, at any step of the way, to know why. MindSign has not made the results of this experiment available as of this writing, but their attempt represents perhaps the simplest framing of the neuromarketers Holy Grail: the attempt to locate a buy button (or series of buttons) in the brain a response, that when activated, would correlate with the measurable likelihood of the incidence of subsequent desired behaviour: in this instance, a purchase of the product in question. Given the relatively long-term scope of brand development campaigns, and in the absence of any denitive research on buy buttons, neuromarketing has followed the established trajectory of previous iterations of market research by relying on proxy measures for anticipated consumption, including level of engagement with marketing appeals, level of emotional arousal, and measured levels of advertising recall (Fugate 2007). To date neuromarketing has traded largely on the promise to access aspects of consumer decision-making inaccessible to other types of research and to pit the more direct access of science against the vicissitudes of interpretation and speculation a promise taken up in the following section.

5. NeuroPromises
The promise of neuromarketing can be situated within the broader context of the impasses of representation it promises to resolve. Doing so amounts to an attempt to address the overarching questions posed about neuromarketing by Schneider and Woolgar: why is this form of reductionism rampant at this point of our history? What explains the general preference for accounts of human behaviour that privilege the gene, the brain and so on, over the person? (2012: 186). If we are confronted by our own awareness of the practical and theoretical limitations of representation in a self-consciously media-savvy era, these are ostensibly addressed by defaulting to thinking without thought on the one hand, and, on the other, to direct access to the brain. The combination of a reexive scepticism towards discursive forms of representation with a seemingly na ve faith in the direct evidence of the body (and the brain) is perhaps not as counter-intuitive or

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unfamiliar as it might at rst seem. When all forms of representation are revealed as partial (in all senses of the word), some basis for adjudicating between competing accounts and narratives nevertheless remains necessary. If it has always been impossible to fully absorb the information by which we are surrounded still more so to be fully informed about events both proximate and distant the palpable information overload associated with the digital, multi-channel era has made us aware in signicant and novel ways of this impossibility, in part by directly staging it for us in the form of the proliferation of media content readily available to a growing number of people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, thoughtless thought has been embraced by the resurgent conservative populist critique of expertise in the United States a critique licensed by a popularised postmodern mistrust of representation. Consider, for example, the response to global warming one in which the scientic evidence is pitted against both common sense and gut reaction by right-wing critics. When a Berkeley-based scientist who had expressed scepticism towards global warming announced in late 2011 that his assessment of the evidence, nanced in part by right-wing climate deniers, revealed global warming to be real, this was taken not as an invitation to reconsider the evidence, but as further conrmation of the corrupt and unreliable character of scientic research. As Republican consultant and Fox News commentator Noelle Nikpour put it, Scientists are scamming the American people right and left for their own nancial gain (The Daily Show 2011). And how did Nikpour, who is not a climate scientist, know that she was right and the scientic community was wrong? Pure gut instinct the triumph of thoughtless thought over the efforts of researchers and the deluge of so-called data. I think if every American really thought about it, they would have a gut feeling that some of these numbers that the scientists are putting out are not right (The Daily Show 2011). Notice the shift in register here: really deep thought, in the end, defaults to feeling. As Renvoise puts it in his book on neuromarketing (oversimplifying Damasio): Although many of us have been trained to follow our heads, which are dominated by our logical left brains, research has proven that we should be more willing to follow our hearts (2007: 184). Although Gladwell would surely balk at Nikpours use of thinsliced thought to assess climate science, his critique of the dangers of over-thinking and the inefciencies of deliberation align themselves with Damasios critique of the deadlock of high reason. It takes a further step, however, to get from the notion that gut reactions can be

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efcient guides in the decision-making process to the wholesale iz collapse of knowing into feeling. The philosopher Slavoj Z ek describes this step in terms of the decline of symbolic efciency, which refers to the way in which the efcacy of representation is undermined by a generalised, savvy reexivity about the constructed character of representation (1999: 322). The claim that emotional knowing neatly slices the Gordian knot of data glut recalls the promise of neuromarketing: to avail itself of the power of direct, subconscious appeals that bypass the demobilising welter of information and argument. Against the background of the decline of symbolic efciency, the proliferation of information defaults to the category of clutter. If consumers rely on somatic markers and emotional responses to manage the clutter, then marketers can enlist these strategies to cut through it. As DraftFCB, one of the worlds largest global advertising agency networks, announced during the launch of its Institute of Decision Making:
We believe that with less time and more information, heuristics will only become more important. The instinctual side of decision-making is better understood every day, and we want to work with those who are at the leading edge of this exploration. (PR Newswire 2010)

Even as neuromarketers seemingly recapitulate a commitment to the primacy of the individual brain as the pre-social seat of meanings and desires, they sidestep the shortcomings of this formulation by focusing on correlation and prediction. This strategy, whether deliberately or not, addresses the suppressed paradox of neuromarketing: the attempt to bypass mediation with more mediation. Brain scans do not provide direct glimpses into the recesses of authentic selves, but instead offer up highly mediated images subject to the very vagaries and interpretive impasses they purportedly avoid. It is perhaps the length of the interpretive leap from a brightly (and contingently) coloured blot on a scan to the characterisation of someones hopes and dreams, fears, and desires, that allows it to stretch into invisibility and invites the claim of immediate access. On the one hand we have conscious forms of selfrepresentation the subjects stated desire or reasoning on the other, the evidence of the scan. In one of the examples reported by Fugate (2007), women may report on surveys that they nd wrestler-turnedaction hero The Rock unattractive, but records of brain activity indicate otherwise (p. 388). Such experiments privilege often without further explanation the response revealed by the technology over consciously

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articulated assertions and self-reports. In their discussion of neuromarketing, Schneider and Woolgar (2012) describe this logic as common to the deployment of technologies of ironic revelation, whereby,
we see how a particular technological form purports to reveal aspects of individual consciousness which otherwise lay hidden. The revelation is ironic in the particular sense that it depends on the achieved contrast between what appears to be the case . . . and what turns out to be the case as a result of the application of the technology. (2012: 183)

Drawing on a host of recent STS [Science and Technology Studies] theorizing, they argue that these allegedly more authentic aspects of the psyche are performed rather than merely revealed by the technologies (2012: 183). Although it is not entirely clear what they mean by such technological performances, in this instance, it is clear that fMRI images are subject to the same concerns about their interpretive and constructed character as other forms of representation. In the case of The Rock, for example, the location of areas of the brain associated with attractiveness rely on the very forms of self-reporting (about which faces participants nd attractive) that neuromarketers attempt to bypass (see, for example, Aharon et al., 2001). Moreover, as Beaulieu has demonstrated in detail (2000; 2002), while fMRI images may trade on the iconicity of analog photographs, they are not direct images of the brains, but visual representations of data imposed on brain atlases derived from averaging the location of purportedly functional structures. Given the complexity and vagaries of the data and its interpretation, the temptations of the turn to correlation are understandable. Correlation promises to resolve the paradox of attempts to bypass representation with more representations. Deeper truths may be positioned within the subconscious or preconscious subject, but in practice they are tracked according to recorded behaviour. In the end, what matters to marketers is not the question of whether women really nd The Rock attractive or not, but whether the brain activation he triggers correlates with increased ticket sales. The reliance on correlation transposes the promise of neuromarketing from the realm of direct access to individual desires to that of predicting the behaviour of populations. Framed in these terms, neuromarketing aligns itself with those strategies that Patricia Clough identies with emerging practices of social control. She describes a shift in probabilistic measuring techniques from representing populations, even making

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populations, to modulating or manipulating the populations affective capacities (2009: 50). If ideology functions in the realm of iz what Z ek describes as symbolic efciency, alternative strategies like neuromarketing promise to withstand its demise. A gesture towards interior truths may be retained, but is simultaneously displaced by the goal of prediction. According to neuromarketers, this shift is one that can be replicated across the social and economic landscape. The founder of one UK neuromarketing company anticipates the spread of these tools into things like the nancial sector to understand how trust is built and broken down for the banks and more generally how do you make us feel safe and secure? (Kuchler 2010). If marketing strategies seek to permeate realms beyond the realm of consumption proper, including politics and social life more generally, neuromarketing is poised to follow.
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