“When you combine EEG scans with eyemovement tracking, you get unique, entirely nonverbal data on how someone is processing the media or the real-world environment, moment by moment,” Steve says. By scrutinizing where those electrical charges occur in the brain, Steve’s sixty-eight-channel, full-spectrum EEG machine can measure everything from overall engagement to cognition, attention, the level of visual or auditory stimulation, whether the subject’s motor skills are involved, and how well the recognition and memory circuits are being stimulated. “But the subconscious responses can’t be tracked through traditional market research methods.” When groups of neurons are activated in the brain by any kind of stimulus - a picture, a sound, a smell, touch, taste, pain, pleasure, or emotion-a small electrical charge is generated, which indicates that neurological functions such as memory, attention, language processing, and emotion are taking place in the cortex.
“People’s responses to any kind of stimulus, including advertising, include conscious activity-things we can verbalize-and subconscious activity,” he once wrote. In 2008 Steve founded Sands Research, a company that does neuromarketing, a new field using behavioral and neurophysiological data to track the brain’s response to advertising. In 1998 he established Neuroscan, which became the largest supplier of EEG equipment and software for use in neurological research. An El Paso (a city on the San Antonio River) resident by way of Long Beach, California, and Houston, Texas, Steve spent years in academia as a professor, using brain imaging to research Alzheimer’s disease. Steve’s a big, burly, balding guy of the sort that could be mistaken for the local high school science teacher who’s also the football coach, or perhaps the captain of one of the deep-sea fishing boats that call the Outer Banks home. Stephen Sands, biomedical science expert and chief science officer of Sands Research. The cap is the nerve center of a mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) unit, invented by Dr. Even though I look like an extra from an Esther Williams movie who wandered into Woody Allen’s Sleeper by mistake, in truth I’m a human lab rat, here to measure my brain’s response to the ocean. I’m wearing a light blue hat that looks like a bejeweled swim cap, and a heavy black cable snakes down my back like a ponytail. To the left and right, forward, back, and below, all I can see is ocean.
I’m standing on a pier at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, fifty feet above the Atlantic.
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