TOTAL EARLY DETECTION; RAPID RESPONSE
Larry Brilliant's TED Prize Wish [3.8.06]

I wish that you would help build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares.

Larry Brilliant (left) receiving the TED Prize from Peter Gabriel

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Talk of the Nation
March 9, 2006
(click here for audio)

Thinkers Lay Out the Beliefs They Can't Prove

Our day-to-day beliefs often come from established theories, but what about beliefs based on theories in progress? A new book asks literary and scientific thinkers about what they believe but cannot prove.

[...continue]

WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL? [2.6.06]
The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment
By Marco Iacoboni

This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads

[...continue]

TOTAL EARLY DETECTION; RAPID RESPONSE
Larry Brilliant's TED Prize Wish [2.23.06]

I wish that you would help build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares.

Photo by Jonathan Brilliant

Introduction by John Brockman

In the 1970s, Larry Brilliant was one the leaders of the successful World Health Organization smallpox eradication program. More than 500 million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century. Thirty years ago, two million lives a year were still being claimed. Yet in 1980, the disease was completely eradicated from the face of the planet.

Brilliant was a highlight at this year's TED (technology, entertainment, design) Conference where he was a recipient of the 2006 TED Prize, in which the recipient makes a "wish". Among the TED attendees are executives who run world-class companies and have pledged support to help fulfill these wishes. This is in addition to each winner receiving $100,000 to be spent however they choose in support of their wishes.

The same week, during TED, Google hired Brilliant to head Google.org. The Foundation, which serves as the umbrella organization for Google's philanthropic activities, is funded by 1% of the corporations stock, or, about $1 billion. In his first act as the Executive Director of Google.org, Brilliant said Google will join other TED attendees to support formation of an organization to detect early signs of emerging, global health crises, such as bird flu. The name of the project: "The International Network System for Total Early Disease Detection."

Below is a link to the TED streaming video of Larry Brilliant's TED Prize acceptance speech in which he outlines his vision for a "powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares".

— JB

LARRY BRILLIANT, Executive Director of Google.org. is a medical doctor who was a professor of international health and epidemiology at the University of Michigan from 1976-1986 and prior to that he lived in India and worked as a medical officer for the United Nations World Health Organization helping lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox. He is a founder and a director of the Seva Foundation, an international organization dedicated to fighting blindness.

Larry Brilliant's Edge Bio page

TOTAL EARLY DETECTION; RAPID RESPONSE
Larry Brilliant's TED Prize Wish

Larry Brilliant (left) receiving TED Prize from Peter Gabriel

LARRY BRILLIANT'S WISH: I wish that you would help build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares.

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[Click here for Larry Brilliant's half-hour presentation during the TED Prize session] [On button bar on at bottom of screen click on icon on left — "View Archive Transcript" — once it opens, in the left panel, click on "Video [0:57:52]"

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Plan of Execution:

• The system should be transparent, with basic information freely available to everyone, preferably in their own language and will be independent of any single government, any single company, any single UN agency, but will offer its alerts, data, access to all
  
  
• Build out team starting from existing Canadian operation (GPHIN – the Global Public Health Information Network) which detected SARS and other epidemics and disasters in time to help the world respond and contain them
  
  
• Negotiate with Canadian Government to move operations into a new non-governmental entity (either non profit or for profit – TBD – dependent on keeping economic self sufficiency with major employment in Canada but with parallel system in another time zone and another continent)
  
  
• Create broad alliance of companies and institutions who back the idea: the new entity will be controlled by independent board of directors
  
  
• Strong indications of support from Kleiner Perkins, Sun, Omidyar Network, Google and others
  
  
• Collaboration with WHO, CDC, Health Canada, multiple universities
  
  
• Create expert advisory boards in fields of: epidemiology, natural disasters, industrial and environmental catastrophes, famine, human right; this expertise will shape which indicators to prioritize

We Are Looking For:

• A braintrust to help identify the most useful/powerful patterns of danger to look for
  
  
• Companies willing to contribute the following technologies… servers, super-computing services, hosting, telecom services, cell phones and more
  
  
• Full-time employees in the following areas: CEO or executive director, fundraising, business development, epidemiology, early detection systems
  
  
• A PR and communications partner
  
  
• Media partners
  
  
• Relationships with a wide variety of other partners in multiple countries
  

Questions we're still asking:

• Is this best done as a for-profit or non-profit?
  
  
• Apart from pandemic prevention what are the other best applications of the service?  (Drought/starvation watch? Refugee crises? Human rights issues? Environmental issues?)
  
  
• What are the best ways to preserve transparency and negotiate privacy issues?

What haven't we thought of?

Talk of the Nation
March 9, 2006
(click here for audio)

Thinkers Lay Out the Beliefs They Can't Prove

Our day-to-day beliefs often come from established theories, but what about beliefs based on theories in progress? A new book asks literary and scientific thinkers about what they believe but cannot prove.

Guests:

John Brockman, editor, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers in Science in the Age of Certainty; author and literary agent; publisher and editor of Edge.org

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist; professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University; author of many books about science and evolution, including The Selfish Geneand most recently, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; her books include The Scientist in the Club

Paul Steinhardt, theoretical physicist; Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University

This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads.

WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL?
The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment
By Marco Iacoboni

Commercials are part of our lives. We watch them, we enjoy them, discuss them with our friends. Do commercials make us buy the product they advertise? Nobody really knows. The most anticipated 'ad experience' is watching the Super Bowl ads. And after the game, there is a flurry of opinions from marketing experts and focus groups on what was the most effective Super Bowl ad. This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads. The way fMRI works is relatively simple: different levels of cerebral blood oxygenation have different magnetic properties. Moreover, changes in blood oxygenation correlate with changes in neural activity. Thus, without using any contrast agent, fMRI can measure how much brain areas are activated during sensory, cognitive and motor experiences. 

This very first attempt at doing 'instant-science' is a collaborative effort between Marco Iacoboni's group — a leading group in functional neuroimaging — and FKF Applied Research, a marketing firm dedicated to conducting ethical projects and making key information publicly available. The main idea behind this project is that there is often a disconnect between what people say about what they like — and the real, underlying deeper motives that make us wanting and liking some things and some people, but not others. With fMRI, it is possible to look at unfiltered brain responses, to measure how the ads shown today elicit emotions, induce empathy, inspire liking and wanting. So, to put it bluntly:

Who really won the Super Bowl?

Here is the answer.

— JB

MARCO IACOBONI, MD PhD, is a neurologist and neuroscientist originally from Italy. Today he is at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he serves on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and is Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation laboratory of the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Iacoboni's lab is arguably the leading lab in human mirror neuron research and he has a close relationship with Giacomo Rizzolatti in whose lab mirror neurons were originally discovered in monkeys.

Marco Iacoboni's Edge Bio page

WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL?

(-UPDATE- the Superbowl ads can be viewed on googlevideo at the following: link)

PART I - 2.6.06
The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment

Science has generally a very slow pace. It typically takes months — if not years — to complete an experiment. Today, at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, my associates Jonas Kaplan, and Eric Mooshagian performed under my supervision an experiment that lasted only few hours. True, we are still analyzing a good 60% of the data, but by tomorrow the 'instant-science experiment' will be basically completed. The idea was to do brain imaging of Super Bowl ads, and to do it the very same night the ads were shown for the first time. With the help of FKF Applied Research and its experience in advertising, we managed to upload digitized ads and run the brain imaging experiment in five healthy volunteers. The participating subjects were interviewed after the experiment, to test whether the brain data collected in the scanner matched what the subjects thought they liked or disliked. This is just a preliminary report on the first analyses, I will be posting a final report later today or tomorrow.

Who won the Super Bowl ads competition? If a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy, two winners seem to be the 'I am going to Disney' ad and the Bud 'office' ad. In contrast, two big floppers seem to be the Bud 'secret fridge' ad and the Aleve ad. What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas.

Among the ads that seem relatively successful, I want to single out the Michelob ad. Above is a picture showing the brain activation associated with the ad. What is interesting is the strong response — indicated by the arrow — in 'mirror neuron' areas, premotor areas active when you make an action and when you see somebody else making the same action. The activity in these areas may represent some form of empathic response. Or, given that these areas are also premotor areas for mouth movements, it may represent the simulated action of drinking a beer elicited in viewers by the ad. Whatever it is, it seems a good brain response to the ad.

PART II - 2.7.06
Complete results of the instant-science brain imaging experiment on Super Bowl ads

We have now completed our analyses on the fMRI data from five healthy volunteers that were studied last night at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center while they were watching Super Bowl ads. We tested a total of 24 ads, 21 Super Bowl ads and three ‘test ads’ that were previously shown. Our results show that the overwhelming winner among the Super Bowl ads is the Disney – NFL ‘I am going to Disney’ ad. The Disney ad elicited strong responses in orbito-frontal cortex and ventral striatum, two brain regions associated with processing of rewards. Also, the Disney ad induced robust responses in mirror neuron areas, indicating identification and empathy. Further, the circuit for cognitive control, encompassing anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was highly active while watching the Disney ad. We consider all these features positive markers of brain responses to the ad. In second place, the Sierra Mist ad, activated the same brain regions but less so than the Disney ad.

Considering the hype surrounding the ads, I would say several ads performed poorly when judged on the basis of the brain activity induced in key areas for social behavior. However, the three biggest flops seem to be the Burger King ad, the FedEx ad, and the GoDaddy ad. Three quite interesting features that come out of this instant-study are the following: first, people – when interviewed - tend to say what they are expected to say, but their brain seems to say the opposite. For instance, female subjects may give verbally very low ‘grades’ to ads using actresses in sexy roles, but their mirror neuron areas seem to fire up quite a bit, suggesting some form of identification and empathy. Second, in some fMRI runs we presented the same ad twice, just to test for habituation. We saw strong habituation effects, such that the second time around the commercial induces much weaker responses. Third -  and this is probably interesting to neuroscientists – among brain regions associated with complex social behavior, we observed a mix of activation and de-activation. Only mirror neuron areas demonstrated quite a systematic activation while watching the ads, a feature that one generally sees only in perceptual areas, such as auditory and visual areas. This suggests that mirroring is a fairly automatic processing. However, in mirror neuron areas we did observe different degrees of activation.

Finally, the highlights of the day. This is the brain activity of one of our subjects recorded while the subject was watching the Disney ad. Both mirror neuron areas and ventral striatum – indicated by the yellow arrows – are engaged by the ad.

There is a big jump in amygdala activity when the dinosaur crushes the caveman, as shown below. The scene looks funny and has been described as funny by lots of people, but your amygdala still perceives it as threatening, another example of disconnect between verbal reports on ads and brain activity while viewing the ads.

If you want to know more about these analyses, and have a more savvy advertising oriented angle of this project, look into the FKF Applied Research web site (www.fkfadrank.com/superbowl). Without the inspiration, help and expertise of FKF Applied Research this project could not have happened.