Do You Know Your Mind?

fMRI techniques can predict your response better than what you express.

If technology could predict our actions better than we can, we would be entering a realm that would raise all manner of ethical issues. A few months earlier, Open had run an article on the emerging field of neuromarketing, where brain scanning techniques are being used as a market research tool. The power of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) methods has been illustrated by new research which uses this technique to study how people respond to public service announcements on sunscreen use. 

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), researchers picked 20 volunteers, ten males and ten females. They underwent fMRI scanning as they saw and heard a series of public service announcements. They were then asked whether they planned on using sunscreen. A week later, they were again asked if they have used sunscreen. The prediction based on models developed through scanning was far better than people’s own assessments of what they thought they would do after listening to the announcements. “There is a very long history within psychology of people not being very good judges of what they will actually do in a future situation,” says the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor, “Many people ‘decide’ to do things, but then don’t do them.”

The study, by Lieberman and lead author Emily Falk, shows increased activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex among individuals viewing and listening to the public service announcements on sunscreen use strongly correlated with their use of sunscreen the following week. “From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman says. “If you just go by what people say they will do, you get fewer than half of the people accurately predicted, and using this brain region, we could do significantly better.”

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