Marketing to the Mind

This is creepy. It's tough enough having to combat the regular stream of advertising that comes to us -- with psychological refinement, the messages are meant to penetrate and grab parts of our brains looking for a fix. But with ads today, we have a fighting chance, as the ads are refined and focused by shrinks that employ crude tools that are hardly accurate, prone to being wrong and gives a mature brain a chance. That's about to change. Enter hard science and the precision tools it employs -- suddenly the marketers have new high-tech weapons ready to dissect our thoughts and secrets, and turn them on us. Scientists are now using MRI scanners to build a better picture of how we think -- how we recognize -- and how we perceive something as cool.