today

Nov. 28 - Marketers may have your number, neurologically speaking: A new study finds that familiar brands evoke faster, more positive responses in the brain than lesser-known brands.
In tests on young adults using real-time functional MRI (fMRI), the logos of well-known auto and insurance companies "lit up" areas of the brain associated with warm emotions, reward and self-identity...... this research - taking individual needs more seriously - "may contribute to higher (consumer) satisfaction and better quality of life."

The findings, scheduled for presentation Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, are the latest from the emerging field of "neuroeconomics"

IMO: None of this is new and one major problem is that the users of this information are people like lawyers and businessmen who do not feel constrained in any way by medical ethics, or indeed any kind of ethics or fair play. Often enough research, which would if called "medical research" be disallowed by medical ethics, can be done on expensive equipment intended for ethical medical and scientific use. When poor people need medical treatment or scientists want to do ethical research, large firms are using facilities intended to cure them to sell them cheap worthless goods like cigarettes at a high price. That is the fact of the matter. And it is going to get much worse. Right now, in secret laboratories all over the world, insane businessmen are using this equipment to sell poisonous cigarettes to Chinese.