Companies could monitor your brainwaves to test ads

Companies will soon be able to test public reaction to advertisements, music and films before they are released by monitoring the brain signals of a select group as they watch a trial.

So say psychologists who unveiled the results of an unusual set of experiments into so-called neural signals.

Their idea is that by scanning brain activity in just a few individuals who watch a test commercial or television programme, this will predict how a wider audience will also react to it.

Reporting in the journal Nature Communications, a team led by Jacek Dmochowski at Stanford University in California asked 16 volunteers, aged 19 to 32, to watch television as their brain signals were recorded.

They watched the 2010 premiere episode of the popular series The Walking Dead and a set of commercials which first aired in American football's Super Bowl in 2012 and 2013.

The volunteers wore electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to monitor electrical activity in the brain. They were also scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which maps brain activity by pinpointing cerebral blood flow.