Is Microsoft developing brainwashing banner ads?

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6 Comments

Comment by Valeska Whitney on April 4, 2008 at 8:22pm

just the kind of shenanigans you'd expect around April 1st.

Comment by Jeremi Karnell on April 4, 2008 at 8:18pm

Honestly----what a joke!

Comment by Jeff Johnson on April 4, 2008 at 5:55pm

Apple sauce

Comment by Valeska Whitney on April 3, 2008 at 8:14am

Apples, apples, apples, apples...

Comment by Dean Whitney on April 3, 2008 at 8:11am

Yeah, but I after viewing that banner I am starting to crave apples...

Comment by Jeremi Karnell on April 1, 2008 at 3:21pm

I have to say, I find this method highly-suspect. Even if I thought this method works and is ethical (which I do not) no where on trustbanners.com or Amnesia's blog do they disclose the scientific research method they used to come up with their claims. Identifying that Professor Olaf Prilo PHD from the Mind and Brain Institute of New South Wales was involved with the creation of the method is simply not enough.

This stinks a lot like the hype that existed around subliminal messages back in 1957. it was then that A. G. Greewald and S. C. Draine of the University of Washington demonstrated via reliable/repeatable scientific method that subliminal messages are in fact influential. However, they also showed that influence lasts for as little as one-tenth of a second. Furthermore, "messages" that can be registered and incorporated into implicit memory can only be extremely simplistic. Even fragments like "eat popcorn" are too complex for the subliminal mind.

Trustbanner requires the user to watch a banner for 5 seconds and then asks how you feel. Supposedly, over this time period your visual cortex is stimulated by 32 dots blinking at 90 FPS. They claim this provides SPECIFIC stimulation within the cerebral cortex V5 MT, an area of the brain they claim is commonly associated with feelings such as trust, harmony, bliss and shopping. Here I think they are being a little liberal with the truth. V5 MT is part of the Extrastriate cortex, which "is the locus of mid-level vision. Neurons in the extrastriate cortex generally respond to visual stimuli within their receptive fields. These responses are modulated by extraretinal effects, like attention, working memory, and reward expectation" (soruce Wikpedia). However, V5 MT specifically is a region of extrastriate visual cortex that is thought to play a major role in the perception of motion, the integration of local motion signals into global percepts and the guidance of some eye movements. So here is my question...does the single piece of neuroimaging evidence Trustbanner provides on their site an artifact of the fact that the mind is watching "BLINKING LIGHTS" vs feeling "TRUST, HARMONY, BLISS, and SHOPPING"?

Finally, we human beings and our brains are pretty damn complex.....I mean REAAALLLLY complex. To bring this to light, one only needs to consider the following from John J. Ratey, M.D.(associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical School) in his book "a User's Guide to the Brain":

"Each one of our hundred billion neruons have anywhere from 1 to 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. This means that the theoretical number of different connections possible in a single brain is approximately forty quadrillion. Taking into consideration that both changes in synaptic strength and different arrangement in synapses represent the primary mechanism behind the brains ability to represent the world, and that each synapse has ten different states the electrochemical configuration in a single brain comes to a staggering number: ten to the trillionth power. This is an unimaginably large number. In fact, most astrophysicists represent the volume of the known universe, in cubic meters, to be roughly ten to the eighty-seventh power.

Each person from the time they are born to the time they die change their connective patterns every second in response to everything they perceive, think, or do. Thus they create their own unique patterns of neuron connections both in pathways and in strength of connection. The brain is so complex, and so plastic, that it is virtually impossible , except in the broadest fashion to predict how a given factor will influence its state."