What happens in your brain when you see “SharpBrains”?

Well, it depends on how good a job we are doing.

A study pre­sent­ed today at the annu­al meet­ing of the Radi­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety of North Amer­i­ca, car­ried out func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) stud­ies on the brain acti­va­tion of 20 adult men and women when shown a num­ber of logos.

Very inter­est­ing results. We won’t write about them, because 2 great blog­gers have been faster than us and have great entries already on the study. You can read

a) Famil­iar brand names may elic­it pos­i­tive emo­tion­al respons­es in the brain at The Neu­rophiloso­pher blog. A cou­ple of quotes:

-“it seems that strong brand names, with which the par­tic­i­pants are more famil­iar, were processed with less effort than weak­er ones.”

-“One very well-pub­li­cized neu­ro­mar­ket­ing study was car­ried out by Read Mon­tague, of the Human Neu­roimag­ing Lab at the Bay­lor Col­lege of Med­i­cine in Hous­ton, Texas, who tried to deter­mine the neur­al cor­re­lates of taste pref­er­ences by apply­ing func­tion­al imag­ing to the “Pep­si Challenge”

b) Brain Brand­ing: The Pow­er of Strong Brands at the Neu­ro­mar­ket­ing blog.

- “Although this may be the first study of its exact type, oth­er neu­ro­mar­ket­ing researchers have looked at brand­ing top­ics with fMRI tech­niques. In Jan­u­ary, we post­ed Brand­ing and the Brain, which men­tioned research more ful­ly described by New Sci­en­tist in How brands get wired into the brain.”

Mean­while, Vaugh­an, the Mind Hacks writ­ing machine, won­ders about the brand­ing con­fu­sion between “psy­chi­a­try” and “psy­chol­o­gy” in How brands get wired into the brain, list­ing a few fun­ny exam­ples and ask­ing for leads to fun­ny con­cep­tu­al swaps.