Cognitive Labs

Dan Bricklin, the co-developer of the early spreadsheet program VisiCalc has this chart on his site, showing the interval between the development of a technology and its adoption. Sometimes the interval is short, sometimes it is long, or it may never happen.

For example, if you walk into the lobby of SRI in Menlo Park there is a memorial to the computer mouse. You can read how SRI played a role in the early development of this technological cast-off by creating and licensing it, in addition to helping Walt Disney figure out which orange grove to build Disneyland in, rather than Burbank. Years later, the mouse became ubiquitous.

Where the interval is long, presumably, user behavior catches up with the vision, market reaction is accelerated by some means, or the product is configured in such a way as to appeal to a broader market (usually components of the above) in addition to enhanced usability or friendliness.

Since people make snap judgments based on just a few milliseconds of detection and analysis, a friendly simple ap is a lot more likely to be loved than something really complex and you know, unfriendly.

Labels: bricklin, sri

Wes says this looks like an interesting evening. I agree. I'll have a doppio espresso, twist of lime



Details

Please note: the January Café will take place on THURSDAY!

Come to SRI for a conversation with our next Café Scientifique speaker:

Lennart Mucke, MD

Director, Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease
Professor of Neurology & Neuroscience, UCSF

will discuss:

What Will it Take to Defeat Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders
Thursday, January 22, 2009 from 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.

Labels: cafe, scientifique, sri

That's a fine question.

We did a little digging and went back to the year 1999 - the year of the IPO with many deals grounded in three words: internet, potential, optimism and the year made famous by the artist once again known as prince.

That was also the year in which a small interactive agency created the first action-game advertisement, punch the monkey which was Flash, not Java - which had jillions of impressions in the remnant inventory category by 2001 and was used as a system default by companies like L90, DoubleClick, Avenue A, etc as they slid down to temporary obscurity (most were resurrected in the past 2-3 years, like a Phoenix, if they stuck to their knitting).

Here's one I grabbed from mikeonads.com which he grabbed from mySpace...

We’ve all seen this ad… it loudly proclaims “Punch the monkey to win a free _____”, fill in the blank with whatever is new and out today. A ps3, an xbox, maybe even an iphone (which hasn’t even been released yet). It’s perhaps one of the strangest phenomenons of online advertising, and I have yet to meet a person not in the industry who understands how these make money.

lets look at an example I just saw on myspace.com:

So, if I hit this monkey ten times, I’m going to get a FREE PS3!!!

We would contend that Advertising is in its infancy. Disliked though it may be, advertising drives spurts of online innovation and will morph into forms that are heretofore unimagined, including not only avatars and virtual worlds (which already exist in version 1.0 format) but more bold and even 'dangerous' visions involving neuroscience and cognition which will impact multiple senses - vision, touch, and smell and thought.

The sense of smell (olfactory sense) is one of the most powerful emotional influencers, and the nose is the most direct pathway to the brain, bypassing the blood brain barrier. For this reasons loss of smell is one of the signs of cognitive dysfunction leading to Alzheimer's, and is a typical symptom of individuals suffering from Alzheimer's. (see William Frey's work on olfactory delivery methods).

Smell-based advertising opens up a new vista for marketers, activating memories and fomenting action: hitting a key, thinking a thought, etc.

Imagine if thoughts themselves could be tagged? Marketers could then finally measure mindshare. Since thoughts are electrochemical impulses, the known universe of human thoughts constitute the available market. By distributing a peer-to-peer ad system that people could subscribe to, (e.g., influenced by Sharman Networks, but opt-in, once called altnet, also linked to Skype) the basic marketplace could be formed. In technical theory, a peer system (or hybrid ad servers + peers) would be more ideally suited than a centralized operation..

imagine this:

Advertisement:

"A penny for your thoughts?" Nonsense!
Join neuroadvantage and get paid $100 a month for your thoughts. In fact, the more you think, the more you can earn! (Thoughts replace page views/Think-throughs replace click-throughs)

The peer would faithfully record your individual thoughts for a time. Once the activities were downloaded from all of the subscribing peers, patterns in the data would be located. Now the tricky part...creating electrochemical impulses with affiliated topical tags, that can be shared across the network in real-time, and inserted via your local peer (either a device or something like a personal cognitive address, not unlike an IP address, for each brain). These tags would then be inserted into breaks between individuals thoughts, not unlike the DART system or the old EDI systems broadcasters use to tell affiliates what ads to run when. The disconcerting aspect is that subscribers wouldn't know if that sudden hankering for pizza hut were real or a 'tag.'

This is quite similar to what happens today except the data gathering device is done at the root directory, the brain, rather than a remote subdirectory - the eyeball. Keep taking the concept further and you end up inside the Matrix.

Let's put together a biz plan...

Labels: ads, frey, neuroadvantage, neuromarketing, nose, sri

SRI had their latest "watering hole" this morning on anti-aging: which features presentations by scientists and bioengineers....

Labels: antiaging, sri

Only a few years ago, scientists believed that substances inhaled into the nostrils quickly entered the bloodstream and impacted the individual. However, it turns out that
this is not the case.

Instead, it turns out that the nasal passage is the qickest route to the brain and penetration of the the blood brain barrier, according to scientists.

Interested? Stay tuned for the full story as revealed at SRI International on October 3.

Labels: blood, bloodbrainbarrier, brain, frey, sri, sri international