Not to discount the grand applications and possibilities of Neuroscience. Corante's own Zack Lynch does a wonderful job of illustrating them right here every week in Brain Waves. But the current hype over neuromarketing strikes me as imperial overstretch. Time to get a grip.

Advertisers have always had rather technocratic ambitions and, unfortunately, many conspiracy theorists have given them way too much credit for their supposed powers of persuasion. Americans were warned about the "hidden persuaders" by Vance Packard in the late 1950s -- and we have exaggerated, overestimated and become absurdly paranoid about the impact of advertising ever since.

Now, we are encouraged to believe that advertising is on the edge of becoming a new science -- thanks to the accessibility of new technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Indeed, researchers are now using MRI technology to test reactions to everything from political spots to Coke commercials. We are told that that ad execs will soon pinpoint the "buy button inside the skull."

Well, I'm not buying. And, apparently, I'm not the only one. Media analyst Douglas Rushkoff exposes this trend for the silliness it represents in a compelling editorial on the topic. Even if neuromarketing research does offer a more efficient way of measuring advertising's impact on human impulses than, say, focus groups, it doesn't address the real questions that now confront marketing execs. It quite simply fails to make the critical linkages between stimulus and response -- or, at least, the response that matters. Just because someone finds skimpily clad spokesmodels, ahem, interesting doesn't mean that individual will buy a product or buy it consistently -- and it sure doesn't demonstrate the ROI on today's massive mass advertising spend.

"A decade or so from now, I suspect we will regard neuromarketing researchers and their techniques the way we regard phrenologists or blood-letters today," says Rushkoff. "And we’ll realize that the only people who ended up being hypnotized by their wares were the daft corporate executives who paid for them."