Getting Inside Your Head

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But the atlas should also provide a springboard for a broader range of experiments. "Neuroimaging is more than finding the next drug for anxiety," says Allan Schore, a neuroscientist at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. "We can study empathy, trust, deception, emotional communication, regulation of violence--issues that are central to human existence."

Neuroimaging is also extending into the fields of politics and commerce. Tom Freedman, a former senior adviser to the Clinton Administration, along with his brother Joshua, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, last year founded FKF Applied Research, a company that uses fMRI to study decision making. In the run-up to the presidential election, they found differences in brain activity between Bush and Kerry voters when they were shown political advertisements. The Freedmans are also studying leadership qualities, by looking at how people's brains respond to an image of someone they would be willing to follow compared with that of someone they wouldn't. Both studies could help politicians hone their campaign messages to appeal more effectively to voters.

Corporate America, meanwhile, is hoping brain scanning can help sales. "The big question for neuroeconomics is, How does the human brain make decisions like which car to buy or what to have for lunch," says Antonio Rangel, director of the neuroeconomics lab at Stanford. Research is showing that the limbic system, which governs emotions, often overrides the logical areas of the brain, suggesting that the "rational actor" theory of economics misses deeper sources of motivation rooted in unconscious feelings and interpersonal dynamics. Instead of aiming at consumers' logical decision-making processes, companies could perhaps appeal to the fuzzier side of how people feel about themselves and others around them.

Steven Quartz, director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Caltech, is one of many experts moving into neuromarketing. He is helping Hollywood studios select trailers for new movies by scanning viewers as they watch a series of scenes to see which ones elicit the strongest reactions in the parts of the brain that are associated with reward expectations. Quartz, who works in partnership with market-research company Lieberman Research Worldwide, is similarly scanning consumers to identify emotional reactions to TV commercials and to products' packaging design.

Neuromarketing has its share of critics. Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group that Ralph Nader set up to monitor commercial forces in society, sent letters to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in July 2004 calling for an investigation into the practice. Commercial Alert says it fears neuromarketers could "peer into our brains" and control our buying behavior. Joshua Freedman of FKF says such fears are misplaced. "Some people view this like Frankenstein and brain control, but I think that science, by trying to understand what goes on in human brains, should be very freeing by helping people understand how they make decisions."