The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind

Notes and Sources

These notes provide guidance to the reader looking for source references and additional reading opportunities on the topics covered in The Buying Brain. As I have written this book for readers who are not professional scientists, references to scientific source materials are kept to a minimum.

Chapter 1

The vast difference in information processing capacity between the conscious and subconscious parts of our brains is documented in Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.

Chapter 2

The basics of EEG data collection, including minimal standards for electrode counts and artifact collection, are covered in any neuroscience graduate program. An excellent source is Paul L. Nunez and Ramesh Srinivasan, Electrical Fields in the Brain: The Neurophysics of EEG (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also David Regan, Human Brain Electrophysiology: Evoked Potentials and Evoked Magnetic Fields in Science and Medicine (New York: Elsevier, 1989).

"When asked how to recount how it reacted to something ... the brain actually alters the original data it recorded." For an excellent example of this phenomenon from the world of advertising, see Kathryn Braun et al., "Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past," Psychology and Marketing 19, no. 1 (January 2002):1–23.

On sample sizes for EEG studies, the key is to calculate how many data points are required ...