brainhack

My previous blog entry was about how to hack your brain, found here:

http://tane.li/2009/how-hack-your-brain

At the end of the entry I encouraged people to find even more effective brain hacks and suggested that if you copy the idea, please do tell where you got it from (and link to here, please).

This morning I noticed the first "copycat" add running in the finnish Facebook. Here's a screenshot:

Screenshot from Facebook; clicking the add opens the same page as it does when clicked from Facebook (it's a finnish language page).

I realize that by blogging about this I am in fact advertising them ;-) but I don't mind that much.

It's an add by www.wixawin.com from what I gather (with a very light glance) they seem to be a company not unlike the infamous Jamba! creating products and making money by people subscribing to mobile services as an ongoing subscription. I am sure they have their share of happy and satisfied customers (especially perhaps the people who win free stuff in their competitions). But they also have their opponents. If you put "wixawin.com scam" into Google it gives you this search result with almost 400 hits.

Their domain name gives the following info:

owner-contact: P-NZH86
owner-organization: Haagsma, N
owner-fname: N
owner-lname: Haagsma
owner-street: Postbus 76253
owner-city: Amsterdam
owner-zip: 1070 EG
owner-country: NL
owner-phone: +31201234567
owner-email: info@wixawin.com

RunToShop has been running the pictures in my previous post as advertising in Facebook for a while now. We frequently hear from people who have seen and noticed the adds and remember them very well. The memory imprint left behind by seeing a brainhack like that seems to be quite strong; people might hate it, feel disgusted by it, but they will remember it for sure ;-)

RunToShop just released our recommendation widget. The widget adds a "social layer" of recommendations and comments to any webstore. It can be installed very quickly and is free of charge. You can get the finnish language version (the only one available now, english coming later) from here:

http://www.runtoshop.fi/supplier

Lumene's webstore was one of the first to install the widget on all of their products; like this mineral makeup product here. (webstore and widget in finnish)

Also all RunToShop finnish recommendations can now be followed as a feed in Twitter through this account:

http://www.twitter.com/runtoshop_fi
(note: when publishing this post Twitter was down.. again)
....

Anyways; Glad to see the brain hack spreading around. It does work after all.

If you see any further adaptations of this brain hack, feel free to post a comment here in this post.

Let me begin by saying that this is "highly cool" yet disturbing and unusual stuff. Perfect for a topic I should let you know about on this blog.

The "long history" of all this starts with my first startup in 1999, Taika Technologies, Ltd. You might remember my War Story about how the company got started and what it was like to go through the whole magic carpet ride in the middle of the dotcom crash.

A co-founder of Taika together with me and the rest was Mr. Jouni Mannonen. Jouni is a pioneer and an "old-timer veteran" of the games industry. He's been involved with the local Game Developers Association for years and has started many games industry companies. At one point Jouni was in the DirectX advisory board at Microsoft, and has since gone into producing PSP games. He's also one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics, a world-class company in 3D graphics that got purchased by the Nvidia Corporation in March of 2006.

Jouni is absolutely brilliant and one of the most creative people I know. Like Bill Gates (and many others) he hasn't really finished any formal education (high school dropout), yet has the knowledge equivalent to debate with specialized PhD's in their own field.

One of Jouni's specialities is neuroscience, psychology and neural networks. He is currently working with his team on a couple of potentially groundbreaking ideas in that field.

A long while back we started talking about how the brain functions, how it's laid out on a logical level etc. And pretty soon that took a turn towards a more juicy topic: how to hack it? How to disrupt the normal function of the brain in order to produce a profound effect that is somewhat unsettling and disturbing to experience?

And we found a way!...

The human brain is laid out as a hierarchical neural network. It has different hierarchical levels of function and role. This is strongly tied to how humans experience their environments through their senses and how babies learn and educate their brains on the way to reach maturity. How patterns are constantly observed, matched, reinforced and eventually accepted by the brain as the dominant pattern.

I'm no scientist and nowhere near the expertise level of Jouni or others, but here's my "Donald Duck" explanation of how it roughly goes; The brain is a pattern matching machine. It tries to match signals into patterns and once it finds a pattern it will strongly stick with it and favor that pattern over those of any potential alternative patterns. This can be seen in human evolution: if you are a human standing in tall grass somewhere in the African steppes, and something big and yellow is rushing towards you fast -> you run immediately because your brain tells you that it is a lion. Lion being the first pattern it matched instantly. You don't start to observe if it might be a gazelle, or vegetation floating in the wind etc. The brain matches the first pattern (that is the strongest) and sticks with it. Not the best pattern, but the first. Same applies pretty much with everything the brain does: if you see the character A in the text here in this blog, the brain matches that to the learned pattern A and doesn't really stop to consider if A might be V upside down etc.

The brain is a hierarchical neural network; meaning that when your eyes see sensory input, they don't know what it is that they are seeing. Only the higher levels of hierarchy match the patterns and later tell the eyes where to focus on; to look at a person's face if it's a person, to look at the text if it's a book, to look away if it's the sun, - and arguably in some cases and with some subjects look at the chest area if it's an attractive woman ;-) etc.

Much of the brain's visual pattern matching is tied to the human face. Humans are very social and one of the most important aspects of social function is to recognize emotions, body language, expressions etc in other humans. Hence the brain is very much wired towards pattern matching in facial expressions, eyes, etc. Happy, sad, angry, scared etc - we can all read these emotions from just looking at a picture, or even better with looking at a real person who is displaying them on her face. The eyes see some sensory input and the higher hierarchical levels of our brains figure out the meaning, example; since her eyes are wider and more open than usual, eyebrows pushed forward and down a bit = she must be a bit angry. etc. Some studies have shown that women are actually about 10 times better than men in reading body language; so women probably must have even more developed and active process like this running in their brains; we men are ignorant to many things and frequently miss out on body language signals that are blatantly obvious to women. (in addition to being the finding in many studies I also personally believe that this is the case).

Teh biarn's pettarn macthing si aslo teh raeosn wyh yuo cna raed tihs txet wihtuot mcuh tourlbe at all.

The brain doesn't only match specific isolated patterns like single letters in a text, but it also matches entire words, sentences, patterns in their relative placement and distance, context, style, relevance, temporal relativity, and whole bunch of other factors.

How humans and their brains react to visual stuff because of all this is quite strong. It is entirely the norm in the modeling, fashion, etc industry to quite dramatically fix the "natural flaws" in models in order to make them more attractive. Models frequently get their eyes moved on their faces, eyes enlarged, neck made longer, not to mention all the small flaws in the skin corrected. Much of this is done through makeup first and photoshop later. The end result being an image that matches so much "beautiful patterns" in our brains that our brain is telling us the girl in the image we are seeing is totally stunning.. even if it's a fake.

Case in point, look at this video from Youtube (its a Dove promo):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFlxSlOKNI

...

My brother happens to be a talented professional photographer and I have the impression that he would be doing that stuff daily. So when Jouni and I came up with the idea of hacking the brain through a couple of mechanisms that hit the hierarchical logic like a tactical nuclear warhead I naturally enlisted the professional photoshop skills of my brother. All thou I must say that he did this "job" pretty much as a hobby and used about 60 minutes doing it (man pros are fast!).

Check out the portfolio of Mikko Tikka from http://www.fotonokka.fi/

..and finally after a very long introduction. Here they are, the brain hacks that will make your eyes sore and your mind feel a bit fucked up:

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
Canon in 2D@Flicker.com

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
XirannisX back On@Flicker.com

(C) Mikko Tikka 2008
Click for a larger image
A derivate work from a (CC) Attribution only licensed picture by
J>Ro @Flicker.com

....

Most people when they see the images experience some or all of the following:

a) it is very hard to focus your eyes to see the image clearly, it seems blurred.

b) the image is somehow "wrong" and disturbing

c) the image is very memorable and even when it "hurts to look at" you keep on looking at it for a while

d) there is some sort of emotional response: perhaps you hate it, can't stand it, perhaps you feel curious, you feel intrigued

e) some men even get the feel that the girl(s) in the image are quite attractive

Did you experience any of those?

Why does all of that happen then? That's the question. And that precisely is the brain hack we (or mainly Jouni, being the resident expert here) came up with.

Those images mess up (or rather fuck up) the ability of a hierarchical neural network to match the image to a pattern it would already know.

The image forcibly causes a conflict between two logical layers in your brain. The "lower" layer is entirely assured and convinced that the eyes and mouths you are seeing are real eyes and mouths. They are in the right place (on a face) and they even might be pretty blue eyes, etc.

.. while the "higher" logical layer above the lower layer considers a wider and more broad meaning to the visual input; yes they might be real eyes and real mouths, but is the context right? is it a human face or an alien face?

And the higher logical layer doesn't have a pattern: it sees a monster. An alien. Something unnatural.

The lower layer at the same time keeps on insisting inside your brain that the eyes are real, mouths are real, they are pretty, it's a real face.. and the higher layer is screaming "it's a monster!".

That's your brain hacked right there.

The reason why you can't really focus your eyes and the image seems blurred is because your higher logical layer doesn't know how to instruct your eyes to look at the image. It doesn't match a familiar pattern, it's a monster, you can not look at two sets of eyes at one time.

.. perhaps that's enough for now, I'm not going to reveal everything that there is behind these brain hacks. I'm sure you can figure out much of that stuff yourself; keep looking at them for a while and consider what's happening inside your head. Some hints thou: part of the mechanism why they work is also tied to how human babies grow up and experiences these patterns the first times == essentially meaning "what is imprinted inherently inside the brains of us all".

www.runtoshop.com has used these images for advertising and other commercial messages. I can say that the CTR (Click Through Rate) on these images is way above anything I have ever seen. People can't resist clicking on them, or having some kind of reaction. Seeing the picture just causes a WTF?? reaction and you feel quite compelled to click and find out what the heck is all this about.

We first used these images publicly on 22 of August 2008 in RunToShop's party for our Alpha testing group. (The images were made in early July 2008). One of the images was printed on a drink voucher, and on a couple of leaflets. I can say that by looking at people's reactions that alcohol in your blood doesn't really help your brain feel any better about this ;)

There are many more brain hacks that can be done, and people like Jouni know how to fabricate these. Some day images like these may be banned entirely from advertising; after all subliminal frames in videos are banned almost universally.

Please note that the original copyright for the images is with Mikko Tikka. www.runtoshop.com actually uses these to get our messages across, so please don't use them outright.

If you feel like making your own images like that (a pro photoshopper can make them really well) will you please tell where you got the idea from, and link back to this blog? That would be excellent, thank you.

Since the envelope (and the bleeding edge) has to be pushed all the time: I challenge you to design a brainhack that's even more disturbing than this!