Your Brain on 'Mercedes'

Billboards, TV, newspaper ads -- brand logos are everywhere, and the brain responds quickly to those images, a German study shows.

Christine Born, MD, a radiologist at the University Hospital at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, and colleagues studied the effect of brands on the brains of 20 healthy young men and women.

She and her colleagues showed participants fleeting images -- each lasting three seconds -- of 16 car brands and their logos.

Half the brands were "strong" brands, meaning they were well-known.

The other half were lesser-known, "weak" brands, note the researchers, who don't mention the brands by name in their report.

Participants rated their perception of each brand before, during, and after it was displayed. Meanwhile, their brains were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The brain scans showed that different brain areas were active when participants focused on the stronger and weaker brands.

Participants' brains also apparently worked harder -- showing more activity in the brain scans -- when concentrating on the weaker brands.

It's not clear what meaning, if any, those patterns have in terms of behavior (shopping, for instance).

Born's team says their goal is to use brain science to analyze "economically relevant brain processes."

Their findings were presented Nov. 28 in Chicago at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting.

SOURCES: Radiological Society of North America's 2006 annual meeting, Chicago, Nov. 26-Dec. 1, 2006. News release, Radiological Society of North America.