for the next ten minutes while I talk I
want you to constantly take breaks and
not pay attention to me and ask yourself
how interesting this guy is this of
course will destroy your ability to care
what I say and it demonstrates how
difficult it is to assess our thinking
while we’re thinking but this is what we
often ask people to do when you want to
learn about engagement in marketing we
have focus groups where people enjoy a
movie and just when the hero is about to
make a choice we pause the movie and we
ask them should she fall in love with
the vampire or the wolf and the Lana T
is that there is some part of us that
knows how things are engaging it just we
can’t ask this part that’s our brain so
I’m a neuroscientist and I’m also a
business professor and in the last
couple of years I’ve been interested in
being interested I wanted to know where
in our brain lies this one site that
comes to life when we care about
something and is silent otherwise where
is this region of interest and the
answer was that after a tireless looking
we found nothing
thank you no we couldn’t find this area
that kind of lights up when you care
about something in it silent otherwise
but then a few years ago a colleague of
mine professor Oh her son came up with
something interesting he noticed and
when people watch movies their brains
tend to synchronize as the movie goes
along they tend to look the same over
time and this suggests that this may be
there is no one single area in the brain
that codes our engagement but maybe it’s
the entire brain and how similar it is
across people that tells us how engaging
it is that is how similar all of us are
at the same time we explain to you when
I talk to you right now if I’m extremely
boring then maybe you think about your
chores and you think about a joke that
you heard and maybe you think about some
thing you have to do tomorrow the point
is your minds wander in every direction
but if I’m really very interesting then
I somehow captivate all of your brains
and make you all look alike stupi of
your uniqueness doesn’t matter if you
are men a woman extrovert introvert you
always look alike
basically I make you totally not unique
my grandfather used to tell us say
you’re very unique just like everyone
else and that is essentially what
engaging content does to us it makes us
all look alike this is many ways the
definition of a genius when Mozart
Picasso or Spielberg were sitting in
their studios and composing a symphony
or stroking a brush on a canvas somehow
they were able to penetrate all of our
brains decades later in different
locations with different backgrounds and
make us all look alike importantly it
doesn’t mean that we like the content we
could look alike even if we hate it so
imagine yourself driving in a highway
and there’s a car dent on the right left
you might not want to be there but you
can’t not see that it kind of makes you
all look alike because it captivates
your attention so my student and I
wanted to create a way to measure that
to create content that’s so engaging
that we can see how similar their brains
are and here is the problem
scientists are notoriously not engaging
it’s really hard for labs experiment to
be a fun usually people fall asleep
really it’s good if you’re trying to do
sleep studies but not if you try to do
engaging studies so we were troubled and
then like most science things luck
struck one day I was giving a talk here
in Chicago but my interesting interest
and at the end talk a woman comes to me
and says my name is leta stuffy and I’m
the VP Marketing of AMC Theatres and I’m
interested in engagement because we show
movie trailers before every movie and we
don’t know how to translate what people
care about in the trailers to what they
are going to watch six months later
maybe there’s a way to do something
there so my student Stan Barnett and I
partnered with AMC Theaters and for one
months we closed a movie theater here in
Chicago and for that months everyone who
came to the theater was told that they
could put a mover gladly but they can
participate in a project what we’re
going to study their brains while
they’re watching movies so people start
in the theater like you guys and we put
some device on their head called EEG
that measures their brain activity and
try to see how similar their brains are
while they’re watching movies now EEG
measures the activity from the outside
but it looks at the activity of cells on
the inside if you were to zoom inside a
person’s brain but you will see is a
forest of little cells like the ones you
see here and when they speak the
language is the language overlay how
chemical signals it sounds like this
this is one cell telling another I care
about mmm oh we thought and experience
and if we look at many of them at the
same time you can see how similar the
brains of multiple people are so with
interstate and what we learned quickly
is that trailers that made all the
brains look alike were the ones that
people actually remembered more
afterwards they’re the ones people care
about more and the ones that they wanted
to actually go see afterwards here’s an
example what you see at the top is a
picture of a brain with blue dots those
blue dots are the places where all the
brains of everyone looked alike when
little of the brain was similar the
trailer wasn’t that engaging and people
didn’t care about that much compared to
a trailer that made all the brains look
alike that then ended up being the one
people remembered afterwards cared about
wanted to pay more and ultimately six
months later end up going seeing the
movie so we found a way
to look at similarity between brains and
predict something about your behavior
afterwards without the need to stop and
ask you but then it became even more
interesting because then we said let’s
see if we can look at differences at AMC
Theaters there’s this clip that they
show before every movie where they tell
something about what you can expect and
what you see this yellow line is the
similarity between brains of everyone
the higher it is the more engaging the
most similar the brains are essentially
what you can see here is nothing
flatline nothing interesting happens
here the clip seems like no one is
really engaged then my student had the
idea turn the computer take all the
brains and separate them into two groups
cluster them by how different they are
so everyone inside one group looks the
same but very different to the other
group and then the computer by itself
figured out that the best way to cluster
them was by gender so now you’re seeing
the same clip as before the same data
just broken by two groups I’ll let you
figure out yourself who are the men and
and in Italy of all the Britain they
study the ones that were most dissimilar
were mine and my then-girlfriend
because they one day my students called
me and said we missing two subject can
you come and participate and I convinced
her to join me only to learn that it was
a Valentine’s Day in the movie which was
Robocop so here’s a worry to know that a
lousy date is about to happen
so this metric works and then we try to
see if we can apply it to things so
first we had the idea to look at Super
Bowl ads those cost about four million
dollars for 30 seconds and we try to see
if we can shorten them a little bit
making engagement the same success then
we looked at YouTube videos we partnered
with Google and we took all their clips
that you see before you see what you
wanted to see like the Justin Bieber
clip here and try to predict after five
seconds of viewing how similar the
brains are and maybe what will not be
skipped we work with investors like in
Shark Tank and try to see if I can
predict just looking at their brains
what they’re going to invest in and how
much money we looked at fans of football
teams and try to see how they’re feeling
when their team loses a big time we
looked at storytellers we even looked at
your brain when you’re sleeping most
science experiments and try to see what
happens to content that goes into your
brain we even were able to answer the
all debate whether it’s better to be in
the concert live or to listen to the
same music at home with your great
speaker system the answer lied but it
became really important in apparent that
it’s more than just a simple tool when
the election came 2016 because we could
start looking at the brains of
individuals were looking at the debates
and what we saw was that we can’t tell
who you’re going to vote for by looking
at your brain but we can see what topics
we’ll learn later do gun control
abortion economics we can actually see
what penetrates your brain and make you
care and this becomes a really powerful
tool for politician to know what will
change their constituents mind on
politics still one of the things try to
do is we try to look at the climate
change and we looked at the algo giving
a talk about climate change and try to
see what we make people be more engaged
with what he has to say so I like I’ll
go a lot but he is not known for being
that
engaging in fact a friend of mine who
worked at the Clinton White House told
me that the joke in the White House was
it algo was so Boeing his Secret Service
code name was algo so we try to look at
the brains of patients I didn’t make it
up we did the brains of patients this
time who had their brain open because
they were undergoing brain surgery we
looked at the brain using electrodes
that were inside their head and try to
tell them by giving the feedback what
they should try to do to make Algoma
engaging in this allows us to learn
actually how to tailor the messages such
that it would work on most brains at the
same time
but a positive I care about the most
were in education and in health care in
education most times we have one person
speaking to many people and we hope that
their brains are going to align but it
doesn’t work like this when I speak to
you right now I probably speak too fast
for a third of you just right for a few
and maybe too slow for one but that’s
how we have that teachers work we just
have one brain in front of another and
hope that they’re going to synchronize
what if we start pairing brains so the
teacher is perfectly aligned with his or
her students in Barcelona we partner
with a public school system and we try
to give teachers real-time feedback of
their students brains so they can
actually know what works and what they
should focus on or maybe repeat all what
they can move forward but the most
important thing we did I think was in
healthcare we learned from a company
here in Chicago that is a big healthcare
engagement group that a lot of times
patients leave the doctor’s office don’t
know exactly what to do next they don’t
remember what they were told how many
pills to take when to take them even
though it was said in the meeting so we
try to actually help doctors get access
to the patient’s brains in real time and
see what lands so we make sure that they
actually leave the room knowing what to
do and this improve the health care of
this small community by 40 percent okay
so you already see all the benefits but
maybe some of you already notice that
are a few risks here if you can start
tailoring content to brains you don’t
just have marketing companies who will
show you the next YouTube clip based on
what people like you watched you can
actually start having people tailor a
message
perfectly to you but even more risky is
the fact that what we’re seeing is that
it turns out that when you have brains
that synchronized it leads to behavior
changes as in when you are alike for a
while you start actually seeing the
world in the same way this create echo
chambers but people really become
impervious to things that negate their
views they really see the world in a
similar fashion now it also has benefits
means that if you want to change
something in you you can actually put
your brain next to similar brains and it
will change so for example if you’re
always late and you wanna be on time
instead of just working on it be next to
people who are always on time like Swiss
and Germans and you will start to become
on time if if you want to be funny
instead of reading a book of 1,000 Oaks
just be next to funny people and you
will somehow internalize their thinking
you will learn the cues and how they
work without actually knowing what
you’re learning this means that a
engagement starts looking more like a
commodity something that we can actually
figure out and align with what we want
so you can start forming teams in your
workplace that would be either very
similar brain wise if you need to do
something in parallel or very different
if you have a creative task and it means
that we can start thinking about
engagement in content in a different way
that we did before but that’s not where
it becomes really really powerful and
cool the most thing that we see that I
find really remarkable is that some of
my colleagues figure out ways to not
just look at engagement but actually
induce it working with animals like rats
and mice and monkeys they can actually
put a wire between the brains of animals
and what they see is that there aren’t
just sharing thoughts but actually start
to behave as if they’re one entity
ignoring the fact that there used to be
two it’s as if your left and right
hemispheres aren’t just two independent
entities but part of you so is it that
we see that synchronization in the brain
makes people actually Oh animals
actually behaved the same this suggests
that maybe synchronization in the brain
isn’t just a measure of engagement but
actually a way for our collective
showing of ideas to work
so what did we learn first we have now a
tool to look at grain similarity and in
doing that
assess how engaging things come and
second engaging things are really
important in changing our behaviors now
this is critical because the world we
live in right now is a world where
engagement is required from a lot of
people the companies talked about
customer engagement CEOs of companies
are required to go on stage and they
sell you the new phone on their own
politicians are not just measured by
their policies but actually whether
they’re good on TV
different professors are now asked to
come on stage and give you a 12 minute
talk that hopefully engages you in
telling you about their science in a
profound way what I would like it or not
engagement is something that is critical
right now and we all have to be aware of
that and for the first time we actually
mint the coin of this resource and it’s
important because we know that when
content gets into your brain you will
believe it we can filter it before but
once it’s in your head you will never
doubt it people never say I’m not sure I
believe my own memories on my own
thought in fact my students created this
t-shirt that we have that says don’t
believe everything you think and we know
that this is really hard so now that we
have a tool that allows us to check what
goes in we can actually make sure that
what comes inside our brain isn’t
changing us in ways that we don’t want
essentially we have a tool now that
allows us to make sure that our great
minds are not automatically thinking I
like thank you
[Applause]
[Music] [Applause]
want you to constantly take breaks and
not pay attention to me and ask yourself
how interesting this guy is this of
course will destroy your ability to care
what I say and it demonstrates how
difficult it is to assess our thinking
while we’re thinking but this is what we
often ask people to do when you want to
learn about engagement in marketing we
have focus groups where people enjoy a
movie and just when the hero is about to
make a choice we pause the movie and we
ask them should she fall in love with
the vampire or the wolf and the Lana T
is that there is some part of us that
knows how things are engaging it just we
can’t ask this part that’s our brain so
I’m a neuroscientist and I’m also a
business professor and in the last
couple of years I’ve been interested in
being interested I wanted to know where
in our brain lies this one site that
comes to life when we care about
something and is silent otherwise where
is this region of interest and the
answer was that after a tireless looking
we found nothing
thank you no we couldn’t find this area
that kind of lights up when you care
about something in it silent otherwise
but then a few years ago a colleague of
mine professor Oh her son came up with
something interesting he noticed and
when people watch movies their brains
tend to synchronize as the movie goes
along they tend to look the same over
time and this suggests that this may be
there is no one single area in the brain
that codes our engagement but maybe it’s
the entire brain and how similar it is
across people that tells us how engaging
it is that is how similar all of us are
at the same time we explain to you when
I talk to you right now if I’m extremely
boring then maybe you think about your
chores and you think about a joke that
you heard and maybe you think about some
thing you have to do tomorrow the point
is your minds wander in every direction
but if I’m really very interesting then
I somehow captivate all of your brains
and make you all look alike stupi of
your uniqueness doesn’t matter if you
are men a woman extrovert introvert you
always look alike
basically I make you totally not unique
my grandfather used to tell us say
you’re very unique just like everyone
else and that is essentially what
engaging content does to us it makes us
all look alike this is many ways the
definition of a genius when Mozart
Picasso or Spielberg were sitting in
their studios and composing a symphony
or stroking a brush on a canvas somehow
they were able to penetrate all of our
brains decades later in different
locations with different backgrounds and
make us all look alike importantly it
doesn’t mean that we like the content we
could look alike even if we hate it so
imagine yourself driving in a highway
and there’s a car dent on the right left
you might not want to be there but you
can’t not see that it kind of makes you
all look alike because it captivates
your attention so my student and I
wanted to create a way to measure that
to create content that’s so engaging
that we can see how similar their brains
are and here is the problem
scientists are notoriously not engaging
it’s really hard for labs experiment to
be a fun usually people fall asleep
really it’s good if you’re trying to do
sleep studies but not if you try to do
engaging studies so we were troubled and
then like most science things luck
struck one day I was giving a talk here
in Chicago but my interesting interest
and at the end talk a woman comes to me
and says my name is leta stuffy and I’m
the VP Marketing of AMC Theatres and I’m
interested in engagement because we show
movie trailers before every movie and we
don’t know how to translate what people
care about in the trailers to what they
are going to watch six months later
maybe there’s a way to do something
there so my student Stan Barnett and I
partnered with AMC Theaters and for one
months we closed a movie theater here in
Chicago and for that months everyone who
came to the theater was told that they
could put a mover gladly but they can
participate in a project what we’re
going to study their brains while
they’re watching movies so people start
in the theater like you guys and we put
some device on their head called EEG
that measures their brain activity and
try to see how similar their brains are
while they’re watching movies now EEG
measures the activity from the outside
but it looks at the activity of cells on
the inside if you were to zoom inside a
person’s brain but you will see is a
forest of little cells like the ones you
see here and when they speak the
language is the language overlay how
chemical signals it sounds like this
this is one cell telling another I care
about mmm oh we thought and experience
and if we look at many of them at the
same time you can see how similar the
brains of multiple people are so with
interstate and what we learned quickly
is that trailers that made all the
brains look alike were the ones that
people actually remembered more
afterwards they’re the ones people care
about more and the ones that they wanted
to actually go see afterwards here’s an
example what you see at the top is a
picture of a brain with blue dots those
blue dots are the places where all the
brains of everyone looked alike when
little of the brain was similar the
trailer wasn’t that engaging and people
didn’t care about that much compared to
a trailer that made all the brains look
alike that then ended up being the one
people remembered afterwards cared about
wanted to pay more and ultimately six
months later end up going seeing the
movie so we found a way
to look at similarity between brains and
predict something about your behavior
afterwards without the need to stop and
ask you but then it became even more
interesting because then we said let’s
see if we can look at differences at AMC
Theaters there’s this clip that they
show before every movie where they tell
something about what you can expect and
what you see this yellow line is the
similarity between brains of everyone
the higher it is the more engaging the
most similar the brains are essentially
what you can see here is nothing
flatline nothing interesting happens
here the clip seems like no one is
really engaged then my student had the
idea turn the computer take all the
brains and separate them into two groups
cluster them by how different they are
so everyone inside one group looks the
same but very different to the other
group and then the computer by itself
figured out that the best way to cluster
them was by gender so now you’re seeing
the same clip as before the same data
just broken by two groups I’ll let you
figure out yourself who are the men and
and in Italy of all the Britain they
study the ones that were most dissimilar
were mine and my then-girlfriend
because they one day my students called
me and said we missing two subject can
you come and participate and I convinced
her to join me only to learn that it was
a Valentine’s Day in the movie which was
Robocop so here’s a worry to know that a
lousy date is about to happen
so this metric works and then we try to
see if we can apply it to things so
first we had the idea to look at Super
Bowl ads those cost about four million
dollars for 30 seconds and we try to see
if we can shorten them a little bit
making engagement the same success then
we looked at YouTube videos we partnered
with Google and we took all their clips
that you see before you see what you
wanted to see like the Justin Bieber
clip here and try to predict after five
seconds of viewing how similar the
brains are and maybe what will not be
skipped we work with investors like in
Shark Tank and try to see if I can
predict just looking at their brains
what they’re going to invest in and how
much money we looked at fans of football
teams and try to see how they’re feeling
when their team loses a big time we
looked at storytellers we even looked at
your brain when you’re sleeping most
science experiments and try to see what
happens to content that goes into your
brain we even were able to answer the
all debate whether it’s better to be in
the concert live or to listen to the
same music at home with your great
speaker system the answer lied but it
became really important in apparent that
it’s more than just a simple tool when
the election came 2016 because we could
start looking at the brains of
individuals were looking at the debates
and what we saw was that we can’t tell
who you’re going to vote for by looking
at your brain but we can see what topics
we’ll learn later do gun control
abortion economics we can actually see
what penetrates your brain and make you
care and this becomes a really powerful
tool for politician to know what will
change their constituents mind on
politics still one of the things try to
do is we try to look at the climate
change and we looked at the algo giving
a talk about climate change and try to
see what we make people be more engaged
with what he has to say so I like I’ll
go a lot but he is not known for being
that
engaging in fact a friend of mine who
worked at the Clinton White House told
me that the joke in the White House was
it algo was so Boeing his Secret Service
code name was algo so we try to look at
the brains of patients I didn’t make it
up we did the brains of patients this
time who had their brain open because
they were undergoing brain surgery we
looked at the brain using electrodes
that were inside their head and try to
tell them by giving the feedback what
they should try to do to make Algoma
engaging in this allows us to learn
actually how to tailor the messages such
that it would work on most brains at the
same time
but a positive I care about the most
were in education and in health care in
education most times we have one person
speaking to many people and we hope that
their brains are going to align but it
doesn’t work like this when I speak to
you right now I probably speak too fast
for a third of you just right for a few
and maybe too slow for one but that’s
how we have that teachers work we just
have one brain in front of another and
hope that they’re going to synchronize
what if we start pairing brains so the
teacher is perfectly aligned with his or
her students in Barcelona we partner
with a public school system and we try
to give teachers real-time feedback of
their students brains so they can
actually know what works and what they
should focus on or maybe repeat all what
they can move forward but the most
important thing we did I think was in
healthcare we learned from a company
here in Chicago that is a big healthcare
engagement group that a lot of times
patients leave the doctor’s office don’t
know exactly what to do next they don’t
remember what they were told how many
pills to take when to take them even
though it was said in the meeting so we
try to actually help doctors get access
to the patient’s brains in real time and
see what lands so we make sure that they
actually leave the room knowing what to
do and this improve the health care of
this small community by 40 percent okay
so you already see all the benefits but
maybe some of you already notice that
are a few risks here if you can start
tailoring content to brains you don’t
just have marketing companies who will
show you the next YouTube clip based on
what people like you watched you can
actually start having people tailor a
message
perfectly to you but even more risky is
the fact that what we’re seeing is that
it turns out that when you have brains
that synchronized it leads to behavior
changes as in when you are alike for a
while you start actually seeing the
world in the same way this create echo
chambers but people really become
impervious to things that negate their
views they really see the world in a
similar fashion now it also has benefits
means that if you want to change
something in you you can actually put
your brain next to similar brains and it
will change so for example if you’re
always late and you wanna be on time
instead of just working on it be next to
people who are always on time like Swiss
and Germans and you will start to become
on time if if you want to be funny
instead of reading a book of 1,000 Oaks
just be next to funny people and you
will somehow internalize their thinking
you will learn the cues and how they
work without actually knowing what
you’re learning this means that a
engagement starts looking more like a
commodity something that we can actually
figure out and align with what we want
so you can start forming teams in your
workplace that would be either very
similar brain wise if you need to do
something in parallel or very different
if you have a creative task and it means
that we can start thinking about
engagement in content in a different way
that we did before but that’s not where
it becomes really really powerful and
cool the most thing that we see that I
find really remarkable is that some of
my colleagues figure out ways to not
just look at engagement but actually
induce it working with animals like rats
and mice and monkeys they can actually
put a wire between the brains of animals
and what they see is that there aren’t
just sharing thoughts but actually start
to behave as if they’re one entity
ignoring the fact that there used to be
two it’s as if your left and right
hemispheres aren’t just two independent
entities but part of you so is it that
we see that synchronization in the brain
makes people actually Oh animals
actually behaved the same this suggests
that maybe synchronization in the brain
isn’t just a measure of engagement but
actually a way for our collective
showing of ideas to work
so what did we learn first we have now a
tool to look at grain similarity and in
doing that
assess how engaging things come and
second engaging things are really
important in changing our behaviors now
this is critical because the world we
live in right now is a world where
engagement is required from a lot of
people the companies talked about
customer engagement CEOs of companies
are required to go on stage and they
sell you the new phone on their own
politicians are not just measured by
their policies but actually whether
they’re good on TV
different professors are now asked to
come on stage and give you a 12 minute
talk that hopefully engages you in
telling you about their science in a
profound way what I would like it or not
engagement is something that is critical
right now and we all have to be aware of
that and for the first time we actually
mint the coin of this resource and it’s
important because we know that when
content gets into your brain you will
believe it we can filter it before but
once it’s in your head you will never
doubt it people never say I’m not sure I
believe my own memories on my own
thought in fact my students created this
t-shirt that we have that says don’t
believe everything you think and we know
that this is really hard so now that we
have a tool that allows us to check what
goes in we can actually make sure that
what comes inside our brain isn’t
changing us in ways that we don’t want
essentially we have a tool now that
allows us to make sure that our great
minds are not automatically thinking I
like thank you
[Applause]
[Music] [Applause]
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