IF BRAIN scientist GemmaCalvert has her way, sur-veys such as the recentGallup poll that found Singa-poreans to be joyless, or at

least chary of expressing whatthey feel, will be a thing of thepast.

Professor Calvert, 44, a visit-ing don at the Nanyang BusinessSchool (NBS) here, says that is be-cause such face-to-face or eventelephone surveys are usually awk-ward for respondents, who wouldnaturally avoid giving precise orrevealing answers lest they haveto explain themselves further.

The questions Gallup posed inthat poll, including “Were youwell rested yesterday?” and“Were you treated with respectall day yesterday?”, can be curi-ous, if not confounding, shenotes. They would invite anythingfrom bland off-the-cuff remarksto shocking off-the-wall retortsbecause different people interpretsuch highly subjective queries dif-ferently.

She says of surveys in general:“There is too much reliance onpeople’s explicit responses whenwe know from psychology andneuroscience that most of our be-haviour is driven by non-con-scious feelings and emotions.”

Brain research in the past 15years has shown that the deci-sions people make actually stemfrom their subconscious, not ra-tional thought.

She says: “Descartes’ thinkingman, who is above all other ani-mals because of his unique capaci-ty for thought and language, wascompletely overturned in the late1990s when magnetic resonanceimaging technology helped us seejust how strong the decision-mak-ing areas inside our brain were at-tached to its emotional parts.

“The old reptilian part of ourbrain – which we’d always putdown as being something to con-trol or suppress – was now beingshown to be largely responsiblefor almost everything we do.”

She has devised ways to cap-ture a gut response to any issue,before the analytical part of one’sbrain has time to kick in and cen-sor, shade or whitewash it.

To begin with, her tests haveno questions, or at least none likethose of dime-a-dozen strawpolls. Instead, she gauges whatlies in the subconscious mainly bytesting a respondent’s reactiontime to a series of attributes,which could be in the form ofwords or images.

The brain sees everything incontext, and so, for example, ifsomeone says “fish”, your subcon-scious’ split-second response islikely “chips”, “cat” or “swim”.

Prof Calvert’s signature test,called Brain Link, flashes a seriesof attributes – say “cool”, “fun”and “free” – to a respondent, whothen has to respond within sec-onds by pushing one or two but-tons, with each button represent-ing, say, a brand.

Any delay in pressing eitherbutton, she adds, suggests thatthe respondent does not think thebrand and attribute are a match.

At the same time – and this isher breakthrough – she has beenable to test respondents whilethey have their brains scannedwith a functional magnetic reso-nance imaging (fMRI) machine.

Prof Calvert and her teammount a gadget that looks like acar rear-view mirror onto the

fMRI machine, and that gadgetprojects a series of words or imag-es onto a nearby screen for the re-spondent to watch and respondwith a push of a button on a pro-vided console.

Prof Calvert then charts the re-spondent’s response times andreads that data against the partsof the brain that were the most ac-tive at those times as shown bythe brain scans. She asserts thatthe techniques she has developedto measure one’s behaviour were“very consistent” with brain imag-ing data. “It’s the speed of your re-sponse that we are tagging. So ifone thing is closely associatedwith another, you’re very fast torespond. If not, you’re slower todo so.”

Prof Calvert, who is on theWorld Economic Forum’s (WEF)16-member global agenda councilon neuroscience and behaviour, isquick to stress, however, thatnone of her findings can predicthow a person is going to behave.“You have free will, so just be-cause you can now uncover yoursubconscious, it doesn’t mean youhave to select that,” she says.

Still, Prof Calvert’s findingscan raise eyebrows. Take, for ex-ample, the gory warning labels oncigarette packs. When the Europe-an Commission asked her to testhow effective horrific images ofcancerous tongues, lungs andnecks were in scaring smokers offtobacco, she was able to givethem solid data showing that thelabels did not stop smokers at all.

She studied the brain scans ofrespondents to the Brain Link testand found that when they wereshown all manner of gory imageson cigarette packs, their brains’craving spot, or the nucleus ac-cumbens, lit up, showing that itwas stimulated.

She explains it as a “classicAdam and Eve and the applething” where people externaliserisks: “If you tell smokers thatthey will die, they’ll go, ‘Yeah,well, the rules are for other peo-ple.’”

Her findings were documentedin the book Buyology by MartinLindstrom, a Danish branding ex-pert who is among Time maga-zine’s 100 most influential peopletoday.

Of her work, Lindstrom writes:“Even Dr Calvert was taken abackby the findings: (The) warning la-bels had no effect on suppressingthe smokers’ cravings at all... Butthis wasn’t half as amazing aswhat Dr Calvert discovered onceshe analysed the results further:Cigarette warnings, whether theyinformed smokers they were atrisk of contracting emphysema,heart disease or a host of otherchronic conditions, had in factstimulated an area of the smokers’brains called the nucleus ac-cumbens, otherwise known as thecraving spot.”

To be sure, some neuroscien-tists have pointed out that the im-ages showing a supposedly excit-ed nucleus accumbens might actu-ally be a result of increased brainactivity to inhibit, not increase,desire. So, they argue, the jury isstill out as to whether or not astimulated craving spot necessari-ly shows a craving, or really thewill to inhibit that craving.

But Dr Calvert contends thather findings are “objective datathat is not open to interpreta-tion”. “I can’t put a rosy gloss onit,” she says. “The speed withwhich you respond to that brandand a certain attribute tells us ac-tually how closely those twothings are lying inside the brain.”

So if warning labels don’twork, what would? She thinks tell-ing stories of smokers who are dy-ing because of their habit mightresonate better with everyone.

“People don’t see other people inthe street with neck goitres or can-cerous tongues sticking out ofthem. But people respond to realhuman beings and their stories,”she said.

Industrialists and advertisingagencies alike have, predictably,engaged Dr Calvert to help themdecide on the most impactful mes-sages to target consumers, as wellas allocate advertising budgetsmore accurately.

Prof Calvert, whose clients in-clude the BBC, Viacom and Coca-Cola, quips: “It’s become ano-brainer to describe their prod-ucts or services in a way that ap-peals to everyone’s emotions.”

There was, for instance, a fastfood outlet which asked her totest how consumers would react ifit pumped fragrances into its ea-teries to mask the smell of friedfat – and to see if this might leadthem to crave, and buy, a salad togo with their burger.

But she is quick to add that con-sumers might benefit from herwork as much as commerce. “Ifmanufacturers can now under-stand how to give us what weneed and want, and remove fromsupermarket shelves some of theirproducts that are inferior or fail-ing among consumers, then it’s awin-win situation for both sides.”

But won’t all the extra costs ofengaging Dr Calvert be borne byconsumers? “I don’t think so,”she says carefully. “Think of allthe money they will be saving bynot wasting money and resourcesmaking products and services thatfail.”

It isn’t all about money,though, she insists. The WEF iskeen to use neuroscientific tech-niques such as hers to spur peopletowards better behaviour, includ-ing combating obesity and gettingeveryone to start seeing the elder-ly as a fount of learning, not a bur-den on society.

Among the research projectsshe is embarking on at NanyangTechnological University (NTU) isone on the changing perceptionsof motherhood in Asia, which wassuggested to her by her NBS col-leagues because they thought theresponses to that would be hard-est to elicit. “Many respondentsare worried that what they say isnot appropriate in society, such as‘kids are a pain in the a**’,” saysthe married mother of a seven-year-old girl.

Affable and even-handed, sheis chuffed to be back inSouth-east Asia till 2014 at least,when her teaching contract atNTU is up for renewal. She grewup in Kuala Lumpur where herbanker father was posted in the1970s. After her first degree in so-cial psychology from the LondonSchool of Economics, she workedfor marketing consultancies and aBritish hospital, before earningher DPhil in clinical medicine atOxford University in 1997.

The following year, she set upOxford’s Multisensory Neuroimag-ing Group and, a year later, found-ed Neurosense, a research firmmarrying brain imaging and mar-keting.

Neurosense now has anAsia-Pacific arm based in the In-novation Centre of NTU, whereshe now teaches the new master’scourse in Asian consumer in-sights, as well as MBA classes.

She is also currently fine-tun-ing her techniques to test Singapo-reans’ happiness quotient.

Pooh-poohing the notion thatSingaporeans are the unhappiestpeople around, she says: “Forsomething to be positive, it has tobe measured against somethingnegative; that is why there is somuch humour in Scandinavia be-cause it’s cold and grim and harshup there.

“But Singapore is Contentland,where everything has largely beensatisfactory. So to those who al-ways seem to be wanting to bashSingapore, get over it.”

suk@sph.com.sg

Prof Calvert on...

Her background as a marketer and neurologist

“Some people have actually said of me before I go up to give talks thatI am the woman who combines what is typically considered to be lies,which is marketing, with what is the truth, which is science.”

Feeling more Asian than Caucasian

“Whenever somebody turns on me and says, ‘Well, it’s easy for you –you come from Britain’, I go, ‘Well, maybe I have a passport fromthere, but I like Twisties as much as the next guy and I’m the Maggimee muncher that eats it raw!’ ”

Why she has decided to settle in Singapore“I just think that teachers are more valued here. It’s very easy to bean academic here and say, well, I also founded this company andpeople here find that an interesting thing to explore. Whereas inBritain, it’s a case of ‘Oh, you are an academic, therefore you definitelydon’t know what you are talking about when you talk about business.’ ”

The brain“We’ve got a massive supercomputer on board and it’s done us verywell indeed in evolutionary terms. It’s kept us alive – and, look, we’reat the top of the food chain.”

On the subconscious“Familiarity breeds contempt so you only really notice anyone oranything that you really care for only when it’s gone, as anybodywho’s been married will tell you.”

Professor Gemma Calvert has devised a special test called Brain Link to capture people’s gut response to any issue, beforethe analytical part of their brains has time to kick in and censor, shade or whitewash their views. ST PHOTO: DESMOND FOO

By CHEONG SUK WAISENIOR WRITER

Gut instinct, not wilful, explicit responses tosurveys, is key to understanding human nature,says brain scientist Gemma Calvert

S’poreansjoyless?Gallupsurveywas flawed

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