Neuroesthetics is a research field that investigates neurobiological correlations during the use of artwork. The field of investigation is mainly focused on the figurative arts, but recently has also been extended to literary art as well.

In University of Rome "Sapienza", science meets art and literature to give life to a Neuroaesthetics project: NeuroDante, with the technological support of BrainSigns.

During the project, which lasted several years, research was also carried out at the Library of the Accademia dei Lincei, where the preliminary results were presented to the President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella, and the then President of the Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini.

The aim was to evaluate whether experienced subjects, i.e. university students of humanities courses, and non-experienced, i.e. university students of scientific subjects, showed different reactions in terms of cognitive and emotional involvement when listening to some passages of the Divine Comedy.

The outcomes showed greater cerebral involvement in the expert students and greater emotional involvement instead in the non-experts.

The researchers also observed, in both groups of more and less prepared students, an unconscious tendency to a cerebral response of appreciation while listening to the Divine Comedy passages directly proportional to the cognitive effort expended in listening and understanding the literary work.

Almost as if there was a basic and natural physiological mechanism for appreciating beauty: you don't need to be an expert to admire the great poet's most famous literary work at this level.

Given the interest in the first results, the researchers has already started working on an in-depth study which has involved the actress Lucilla Giagnoni.

The aim is still to study the emotional response to listening to passages read by female and male voices.

The results are being processed and will certainly be reported on the BrainSigns blog as soon as they are available. 

In occasione degli Europei di Calcio e delle Olimpiadi 2021, BrainSigns promuove due test di Neuromarketing che verranno organizzati in modalità "condivisa" nelle settimane del 17 maggio e del 14 Giugno.

Grazie all’esperienza e all’approccio scientifico del team di BrainSigns nella rilevazione e nell'analisi dei segnali neurometrici, avrai la possibilità di testare la tua comunicazione pubblicitaria ottenendo “insight” su contenuti emotivi e cognitivi da valorizzare nella specifica strategia di comunicazione.

Misurare la risposta istintiva in termini di emozione, interesse e attenzione visiva può essere una buona occasione per massimizzare l’efficacia dei GRPs e per ottenere una comunicazione chiara che arrivi direttamente alla mente e al cuore del consumatore.

BrainSigns registrerà 36 soggetti (target generalista) impiegando le seguenti tecnologie neuroscientifiche:

• fascia EEG per la misura dell’attività cognitiva
• sensori di battito cardiaco e conduttanza cutanea per la misura dell'emozione
• eyetracker per la misura dell’attenzione visiva

Ciascun soggetto vedrà un filmato all’interno del quale verrà inserito un break pubblicitario.

Invia il tuo spot entro il 14 Maggio o entro l'11 Giugno, riceverai dopo una settimana un report di valutazione con eventuali suggerimenti di miglioramento degli spot testati.

L’adesione a questa modalità prevede costi contenuti e tempi rapidi.

Di seguito ti proponiamo alcuni casi di studio effettuati dal nostro team che hanno ottenuto un grandissimo successo.

 Although there are more than 7000 different languages spoken in the world by more than 6 billion people, there is one that has always been defined as the universal language par excellence: music.

It has always been part of our life. There are no people who do not play an instrument or compose music. Music moves us and is used to speak about what happens in our soul.

According to Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary theory, humans learned to sing and invented music to court each other, as some birds do. But we also need sounds and songs to dance and make friends, get excited and be together. They connect us to an identity: like national anthems or those of our favourite team.

From a neuroscientific point of view, music as well as language are both processed by both cerebral hemispheres, but the first conveys a communicative process even more deeply rooted in the emotions: for example, it is able to influence our mood and our physiology more quickly and effectively than words and sight. Neuroscientists tell us that listening to a song also activates the areas in our brain that control movement.

So, scientific studies show that a skilfully arranged sequence of notes that 'touches our heart and soul', as we often say, actually affects our nervous system and brain.Listening to music believed pleasant would be accompanied by the release of dopamine, one of the neurotransmitters that most influences mood and emotion, and also produces changes in skin conductance, heart rate, breathing and temperature: all variables that can be measured in correlation with the level of music appreciation.

Even the greatest marketing and communication experts have noticed the enormous power of music, and they have understood that, in a world like ours where we are exposed to thousands of stimuli every day, a sound can be a very efficient way in order to directly and selectively create an emotional link with the brand.

A brand can actually be heard, even when it is not looked at. We all remember the Barilla soundtrack or the sound logo of McDonald's, Windows, Coca Cola, Samsung, Nokia, Audi, Wolkswagen. Listening to them recall us to a brand identity and a univocal brand reputation even if we are in front of a TV with advertising doing other things.

Sound branding, or audio branding, is therefore a way to build the sound identity of a brand, and to get into the thick of the emotions and memory of its audience.

Brands are thus increasingly involved in the world of music and sound and do not want to stay back. But you have to be careful: it is not true that having any kind of sound stimulus is better than having no one. That is why it is important that these new sounds are produced by specialised professionals and that their proposals are properly verified before being adopted. 

Neuromarketing is an ideal testing and selection tool for these proposals because it is able to measure the neurophysiological changes induced by listening and the level of appreciation and emotional involvement of music for a specific brand in direct contact with the same way in which the audiobrand communicates emotion and connection to the brand identity.

This is what BrainSigns has seen with neuromarketing for the audiobranding operations of big companies that have decided to rely on a scientific study to measure the impact of their musical communication. We are talking about TIM and Banca Ifis.  

BrainSigns - ANSA Conference "Information and technology in the fight against Fake News"

In Ernst & Young’s Wavespace in Rome, BrainSigns recently carried out an experiment on the perception of "fake news" with a group of young people (20-35 years old) while viewing some news online. The test was carried out using the technologies to measure ocular activity and facial recognition available in the Wavespace laboratory.

The results obtained were presented by prof. Fabio Babiloni at the conference "Information and technology in the fight against Fake News", organized by ANSA with EY (19 November 2020).

During the experiment, participants received 10 news on a computer in random succession, five were real news and five were 'fake' news.

Before the news was given, the personal psychological traits in terms of conscientiousness, open-mindedness and emotional stability of the participants were evaluated through a psychometric test (Implicit Association Test).

The results obtained were interesting:

• The people more inclined to consider fake news to be true have a psychological profile more inclined to intuitive than reflective thinking, and during the observation of fake news, they often had feelings of 'surprise', clearly more than the others in which a reaction of 'perplexity' was prevalent.
• It was also found that the group of people more inclined to believe in fake news focused on "emotional" elements of the news such as images rather than written text.

In a few words, the results of the experiment suggest that people who are more inclined to believe in fake news generally have a higher level of emotionality and a more intuitive than reflective reasoning style.

This means, for example, that a practical way to limit the negative impact of the spread of fake news could be to "prevent" the immediate sharing of news on several platforms by using messages that invite people to "think before sharing". According to current scientific literature, it is estimated that this could limit the sharing of fake news on the web up to 20%.