Getting inside the minds of moviegoers

Marketing movies
Knight has worked with Neurofocus to survey people's responses to everything from movie trailers to ads that run with television shows. The company's methods have turned heads — a big investment came earlier this year from the Nielsen Company, which tracks viewership to generate TV ratings and other media information.

"We bring people into the laboratory, depending on whichever demographic a company wants examined," Knight said. "We show them material, we wire them up, we put electrodes on their head, and we precisely measure where their eyes are looking, their galvanic skin response and their heart rate."

Neurofocus relies on those electrodes on people's heads to read the brain's electrical activity, using a method known as Electroencephalography (EEG). A computer algorithm gives the most weight to the EEG reading, but also factors in the eye gaze map, skin response and heart rate of test subjects to figure out a viewer's response.

The assessments allow Knight and Neurofocus to figure out whether a film sequence captures the viewer's attention, whether it emotionally engages the viewer, and whether viewers will remember what they saw a day or week later.

The company's algorithm can even take the most interesting parts of a movie or TV show and compress them into an eye-catching trailer.

"If we're analyzing a two-hour movie, we can extract the most salient parts for a trailer automatically," Knight noted. "The most salient parts fit together into a very nice story."

Crowd control
Researchers have also started looking beyond the individual brain to entire groups of viewers.

"Most kinds of experiences are socially consumed," said Suresh Ramanathan, a marketing researcher at the University of Chicago. "When people are consuming an experience together, there’s a form of emotional contagion."

Ramanathan's study in late 2007 found group think affects people watching a movie together. Smiles or laughter at some scenes reinforced each other, and opposite reactions from nearby people led viewers to adjust their own mood.

The Berkeley, Calif.-based Neurofocus plans to turn its sights on precisely gauging the influence of a movie-going crowd.

"The next thing is we're building a small movie theater," Knight said. "The crowd effect is going to be important for certain things. We're definitely moving in that direction."

Moving into the future
Despite its attractions, pitfalls can appear when reading too much into brain scans and other technologies. Hasson voiced concern about people conducting sloppy science under the guise of neuromarketing.

"With the market and the companies that approached me, the clients simply don't care if it's reliable or not," Hasson observed. "No one cares, because it's a sticker on the product."

However, both Hasson and Knight share a vision of neuroscience playing an ever-bigger role in how movies are made, and inevitably marketed.

"I think it's a natural evolution," Knight said. "People we work with keep asking us to look at things at an earlier creative stage."

Clients have already asked Neurofocus to look at storyboards, or illustrations of each scene that will eventually get filmed in a movie or advertisement. Their hope is to create finely tuned products that excite as many brains as possible.

Future research could even test whether a box office smash such as this summer's "The Dark Knight" reflects a tightly controlled thrill-ride experience for moviegoers. If so, directors ranging from Christopher Nolan to Ben Stiller might increasingly find new reasons — and tools — to ensure that our brain responses reflect their cinematic vision.

"We never tested whether we can tell if a movie will succeed in the box office and whether there's a strong correlation or not, but maybe that's the case," Hasson said.

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