By Dr Gemma Calvert and Professor Steve Williams, Neurosense.

Neuroscience certainly has come a long in a relatively short period of time. To explain this development it is worth exploring some of the key events that have defined this field and brought us to where we are today.

In 1890. two eminent physiologists, Roy and Sherrington probably could never have imagined that their observation that neural activity is accompanied by a regional increase in cerebral blood flow was going to lead to their finding becoming the cornerstone of our ability to see inside the working human brain some 100 years later.

But the pursuit to bridge the gap between the mind and the brain took a great leap forward in 1924 when Hans Berger conducted the first EEG recordings from the skull's surface. So this technology allowed scientists to actually monitor, in real time, electrical activity associated with neuronal firing and that's associated with cognitive function, from the skull's surface. Although of course, the localisation of those signals was somewhat intractable.

In 1977 a major advance in medical imaging resulted in the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner surplanting x-rays and CTs before it.

MRI allowed scientist to take exquisitely high resolution images, not only of the human body, but also of the brain. But it wasn't until some 15 years later when Jack Belliveau and his colleagues, working at the Massachusetts General Hospital recognised the importance of that finding in 1890, namely that the neuronal firing was coupled with an increase in blood flow to those brain areas that were becoming active in response to a task.

What they discovered, that MRI was not only able to take high-resolution images of brain structure but was also able to capture the blood flow associated with brain activity. They published a paper in 1991 which basically revolutionised the fields of neuroscience and psychology and which lead to the introduction of a new discipline called cognitive neuroscience.

By 1993 functional magnetic imaging had arrived in the UK at Kings College Hospital in London and four years later application of this technology into the commercial world began.

We've seen dramatic expansion of publications and uses of this technology, not only in the medical field, but in the academic and neuroscientific communities, such that today there are over 10,000 academic papers published on brain function, using functional MRI, and telling us what the different areas of the brain are involved in and how they operate in a concerted fashion to produce the experiences that we recognise.

Let's have a look at MRI. These are images of the brain acquired using a magnetic imaging scanner.

And these are images of the brain acquired using FMRI.

Now functional MRI is to MRI, as a video is to a static photograph. In other words, using the same equipment, we can take images of changes in the brain related to cognitive function. The only difference is that the scanner is running much more quickly

The academic literature has provided us with a vast database of understanding about how different areas of the brain operate. So, for example if we are interested in the marketing field, in areas involved in reward such as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex; in encoding long and short-term memories, such as the hypocampus which is deeply embedded in the temporal lobe. And areas involved in complex decision making.

This image shows the basis of functional specialisation, that different parts of the brain are involved in different functions and they operate in a coordinated fashion when we are running scans and trying to understand what's going on during a particular task.

This is what an fMRI scanner looks like.

It is essentially a large magnet which is about 40,000 times the size of the Earth's magnetic field.

And what we can do is present people in the scanner with videos and images of telly ads by use of strategically positioned mirrors above the subjects head. Or, using fibre optic cables, we can present virtual reality scenes. We're also able to present fragrances, tastes and so forth. And whilst people in the scanner are involved in particular tasks of interest we're able to monitor changes in blood flow, in order to localise and quantify the activity in different brain areas.

For people in the advertising industry one of the key questions is whether fMRI can predict behaviour.

Four years ago we conducted a live experiment conducted for Tomorrow's World.

Our volunteer, Helen, was asked to be scanned whilst we showed her five potential suitors, who she was later going to have to pick for a blind date. And the challenge put to us what to try and predict, based on her brain's response, which one she was going to select.

She passively views five likely lads in the scanner. She views them several times, and what we can do is create an average response in the areas involved in sexual arousal, and specifically the structure called the Ventral Striatum.

It seemed to us, that without doubt, subject number 4 was the person she was going to select, and she subsequently did select him once we had got her out of the scanner, and as far as we know they are still together four years later.

But beyond a role in the dating agency for fMRI, it is being used routinely by a broad number of industries, including of course the pharmaceutical industries who are interested in demonstrating that their drugs have an effect on the cognitive areas of interest; the fmcg sector and cosmetics industry, automobile industry, as well as drinks manufacturers and brewing. And of course, Government security agencies.

Maurice Saatchi, one of our advertising luminaries, commented at the advertising conference in Cannes that "Neuroscience is going to become a very important part of this whole world of communication", but actually, it already is.

IN 2004, a study commissioned by phd demonstrated the dominance of television, broadly speaking, over other media formats and there have been several seminal publications recently on the use of fMRI to predict purchasing, published in very high impact journals.

Neurosense have been working closely with Viacom and GMTV, to expand our knowledge of how TV and advertising impacts on the brain. You can catch up with this work in the research section of the Thinkbox website here.

Next steps for Neuroscience and marketing?

So what sort of things are we are hoping to do in the next couple of years with our neuro-imaging approach?

One concern we do have about advertisements, is when do you become irritated by them, or habituated to those ads themselves? So we are particularly interested in how the brain's response might change with the repeated presentation of the stimulus. And that's something we should be able to do very quickly with our imaging approach.

With this sort of pre-testing we should be able to gain insights that help optimise exposure for a particular creative treatment.

The technology is now at a point when we can measure whether you are engaging with a stimulus and also whether the integration of other stimulus, such as music, actually enhances the memory itself. You can envisage a situation where the musical content might have a large influence on the engagement with the advertisement.

We just completed a piece of research recently, where we placed subjects in a scanner where they listened to a variety of pieces of music that might be used in TV adverts, and we looked at the parts of the brain that were engaged.

Here are two images comparing a happy piece of Mozart with a rather sad piece by an unknown Italian composer.

And as you can see from these two brain maps the activation patterns are completely different.

So we're now trying to learn a lot more about how the context and mood of the music might modulate your attention, your engagement, your memory for the advertisements that we have in mind.