You'll Pay To Know What, And When, To Really Think

Via tech

Here's a small but highly recommended way to seem smarter than you actually are... listen to podcasts. I cycle through a bunch, mostly in a constant effort to find new ways to think about my various projects. Which is how the grist for this week's column came about, which is a new way to think about the next wave of wearable technology.

(Don't worry, I'll bring it around to marketing and advertising eventually.)

Here's the germ of the idea. A research team that was conducting MRI scans of healthy subjects for a baseline study found that, well, it's hard to ask people to just lie still for a long time. Especially in an environment that many people find to be claustrophobic.

So they experimented with a variety of audio programs on headphones during the scan, and found that while music was good, podcasts -- particularly ones that told an engaging story -- were better still.

This probably doesn't come as a striking revelation. From your own day to day, I'm sure you find that when someone is telling you an engaging story, you are more apt to stay still and listen. But what's more telling and interesting is that the actual thought process of listening and learning shows up on the MRI as well.

Here's where I'm going to make two small but defensible leaps of logic. I'm going to presume that the brain is a muscle, and that it does better with routine exercise. And maybe not just the kind that involves sweating, but also the mental kind.

This is, of course, the entire raison d'etre of Lumosity, the "brain games" start up that is, not coincidentally, a frequent buyer of advertising space during, well, podcasts. So it's not exactly a big leap of faith to imagine that properly timed and individually prescribed mental exercises will also help cognitive performance. Also, that we can prove that it's worth doing.

Which brings us to the second leap of logic. A future version of wearables will monitor brain activity, and provide alerts to the user based on various mental conditions.

If you are predisposed to negative potential, you might go immediately to a dark place from this, with thoughts of mind control, exceptional privacy violations, censorship, and so forth. But my inclination is to stay with the personal and the positive, and imagine a scenario in which people struggling with depression are given, well, content at the time when it does them the most good. Or aging patients at risk of mental deterioration are given small puzzles that help them retain and improve. The potential could extend to patients with OCD, postpartum depression, drivers with readings that seem to indicate episodes of micro-sleeping, and so on, and so on.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much untapped human potential would reach the world from people who achieve some measure of additional relief from these conditions. Consider the possibility of lives saved from fleeting thoughts that lead to suicide, moments of regression in fights against addiction, or the more mundane aspects of better awareness and coping mechanisms for stress, and so on. How much more could we achieve as a species, if technology gives us the ability to act without these limits?

Let's bring this back to our bread and butter. So while you are considering all of these possibilities, let's also think about narrow-casting our messaging to people when they might be most interested in buying a product, or most receptive to hearing an advertising message / willing to be distracted from their current task.

After all, a dramatically better human experience?

Still has bills to pay.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.