Pushing the Brain's "Buy Button"

Commercial Alert and prominent psychology experts sent a letter today to Emory University President James Wagner, requesting that Emory stop conducting neuromarketing experiments on human subjects. Neuromarketing is a controversial new field of marketing that maps the brain's activation responses in order prod desires for particular products. It seeks, in the words of Forbes magazine, to "find a buy button inside the skull." According to the Commercial Alert letter, this marketing technique "sounds like something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union, for the purposes of behavior control. Yet it is happening right here in America."