The stuff those scientists get up to over at MIT is amazing. Researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management and Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford have found a way to predict what someone will purchase by using functional MRI to show which brain regions are being activated when they view products and prices. This is a blockbuster study in the emerging field of neuroeconomics (I bet you didn’t even know there was such an emerging field).

…by studying which regions were activated, the authors were able to successfully predict whether the study participants would decide to purchase each item. Activations of the regions associated with product preference and with weighing gains and losses indicated that a person would decide to purchase a product. In contrast, when the region associated with excessive prices was activated participants chose not to buy a product.

Of course, this research seems mainly to deal with helping us understand what motivates us to buy and probably will help retailers overcome the brain bits that are responsible for our frugality. But what if instead of neuroeconomics they turned this technology to dieting?

Imagine, scientists map out the part of the brain responsible for eating chocolate cake and set up transmitters that could alert a main system that your brain is making your mouth water. Immediately, receptors implanted in the part of the brain that are responsible for willpower are activated, so that when your salivating mouth opens to consume the chocolate cake, instead it voices a resounding “No!, No!, No!”. Within just a few weeks you would be able to activate the part of your brain that wanted to buy those leather pants.

I guess science isn’t ready to deal with important issues like that yet.

Researchers use brain scans to predict when people will buy products