Pirates of the Caribbean—that's easily the best ride at Disneyland. At least for me.
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On Being One's Own Rabbit
On Being One's Own Rabbit is the title of a 1927 article by British scientist and mathematician J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964). Haldane wrote about a scientific approach with a long history: self-experimentation. Haldane first did this at the age of eight in his scientist father's home laboratory testing poison gases. A self-experiment he did as an adult testing high levels of oxygen saturation caused a violent seizure that crushed several of Haldane's vertebrae. That's commitment.
Topics: Science Prediction
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5 Ways to Create Immersive Training@ Training Magazine
The editors at Training Magazine asked me if I could identify best practices from the training data collected by Immersion's clients. Excellent idea! Immersion is a prediction engine, so I reviewed anonymized data to identify training that generated high immersion. Across several analyses, we have found the correlation between immersion and recall runs from 0.60-0.70. In human-speak, this means if one delivers high immersion training, participants will remember more of the content weeks later. I contacted learning architects at companies that consistently generated high immersion and asked them to share how they structured their training. The approaches they shared with me are immediately applicable now that the majority of training is being done remotely.
Topics: Training Events
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Face Freaks
It was such a great idea. Capture people's emotional states from facial twitches.
Topics: Science Prediction
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How to Optimize Training with Immersion @TD Magazine
TD Magazine invited me to write an article discussing what our clients have learned using the Immersion platform to optimize the delivery and impact of training. The article explains that the problem with post-training surveys is that people lie. Yes, shocking! People have great difficulty identifying the value of training and how it can be improved because value comes from the unconscious and emotional regions of the brain. This is why measuring neural activity during training is absolutely necessary.
Topics: Training Education Science
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Why not EEG?
That's me and Dr. Jorge Barraza, Immersion's co-founders, calibrating a high-density electroencephalogram (EEG). Immersion's foundational studies measured brain activity multiple ways using EEG, electrocardiograms (ECG), skin conductance, and changes in neurochemicals in blood. Over and over. For hundreds of people.
Topics: Science Prediction
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Neuromyths Debunked
Immersion is full of neuro-nerds. In the last 15 years I've done about 10,000 blood draws to measure neurochemicals in order to figure out when the brain knows that an experience is extraordinary. That's part the comprehensive science that forms the foundation for Immersion—years and years in the lab.
Topics: Training
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The Science of Superfans
Superfans are thrilled by an experience and they respond in an oversized way. The scientists at Immersion wondered if superfans just appeared randomly during an experience or if they shared commonalities. We traced a propensity to superfandom to two personality traits: agreeableness and empathy. These warm and friendly human beings have high "affect intensity" meaning that they experience stronger emotional responses to experiences compared to other people.
Topics: Entertainment marketing
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Why we give to charity
Ben. The little boy's name is Ben. He looks so happy. So, why is his father heartbroken?
Topics: marketing Giving
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Immersion on the Move
Every year cars have more automated features, but some people still want to get on the road simply for the fun of driving. Driving is especially enjoyable when one has the right vehicle for the journey. I have a Hummer that my dog and I take out to the mountains. I did some research on on off-road vehicles before I bought my Hummer, drove a couple of used ones, and then took the plunge. Just like dating, it is hard for people to know which car is the right match for them.
Topics: marketing Events
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Why do some TED Talks go viral?
My knees were shaking as I walked onto the stage at the Edinburgh International Conference Center. I had been invited to give a talk at TED Global, the biggest of the big leagues of public speaking, and I was beyond nervous. So nervous, that a TED production assistant agreed to click through my slides because I couldn't do it myself in rehearsal. Speaking at TED was a life-changing experience—my talk has been viewed over 1.6 million times. But not every TED talk goes viral. TED curator Chris Anderson warned the speakers that only 80% of what appears live at TED makes it online; the other 20% are just not good enough. So, what makes a TED talk great?
Topics: Events
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Customized Classroom
Teachers get too much and too little credit for student outcomes.
Topics: Training Education
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Creating Extraordinary Customer Experiences
After two days, I resolved that Canberra is the world's most boring city. That is why I went back to Sydney.
Topics: marketing Events
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Best Practices When Running Remote Meetings
The global pandemic has forced meetings, teaching, and training to be remote. Running a remote event, as we have discussed before, is not like running an in-person meeting. It needs to be structured to keep people immersed when the social pressure of being in a room together is missing. Immersion's scientists combed through client data who are using our Distributed NeuroscienceTM platform and spoke to users to identify best practices when running remote events. Here's what we have learned.
Topics: Training Events
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Size Matters. How Facebook & Immersion Figured Out What People Love
The largest advertiser in the world, consumer products company Proctor & Gamble, cut their digital advertising by over half a billion dollars between 2018 and 2019 because they could not show it was effective.
Topics: Entertainment marketing
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Your Virtual Events are the New TV
Will your attendees stay tuned or click away?
Topics: Training marketing Events
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The Power of Distributed Neuroscience
Fears of the COVID-19 variant of the coronavirus are impacting all unnecessary gatherings, including attending conferences and date nights at the movie theater. While many of us are now working from home, how is this impacting industries where gathering groups of people are the core of their business?
Topics: marketing
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Fewer Brains Mean Bigger Data
Many companies built their reputations on surveying a thousand or more people to capture national opinions or TV watching habits. Today, online survey companies may maintain panels of respondents and can deliver several thousand data points in a week. We all know bigger is better.
Topics: Entertainment
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Getting Schooled: How Immersion Works in the Classroom
At Immersion, we are "on the ground" technologists. By that I mean we have partners not clients. When our partners find new applications for our technology we ask to observe what they are doing to see if we can suggest improvements. This is just what we did when a partner brought Immersion into K-12 classrooms.
Topics: Training
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Why We Remember
The first time you met your life partner. Birth of your child. The destruction and death of 9/11/2001. They are seared into your memory.
Topics: Training marketing recall
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The Neuroscience of Failed Product Launches
In the 1980’s Coca-Cola was losing market share to Pepsi. The solution, the Coke people thought, was to make a new formula that tasted more like, ahem, Pepsi. Coca-Cola conducted 30,000 blinded taste tests and found that 55% of people said "New Coke" was better than the original. People also said New Coke tasted better than Pepsi. Coca-Cola spent over four million dollars to decide if they should launch New Coke. The people had spoken so the launch was on.
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Going Forward By Starting Backwards
The American Psychological Association christened the 2000s "The Decade of Behavior." They even invited me to give a keynote address on behavioral neuroscience at their national convention. The result? Research by prominent psychologists has shown that fewer studies that seek to explain and predict behavior are being published. What psychologists have focused on, because it is faster to research and publish, are studies of introspection, feelings, intentions, and other self-reported data that copious research shows are only weakly related to actual behaviors.
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How Do You Prove The ROI of Corporate Training?
Great trainers are artists. You may have seen a few of these: everything they present comes alive and tattoos itself onto your brain. The experience is extraordinary.
Topics: Training
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I Believe in Software Not Slides
There was a time when answers were delivered to you on paper, or in a PowerPoint slide deck. If you wanted to know your monthly sales, a person printed it out on big sheets of green and white striped paper for you to review. If you wanted to dig deep into your product plan for the next year, someone sent you a slide deck.
Topics: Entertainment
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Four Ways to Shorten the OODA Loop in Training
"Do you mind getting beat up a bit?"
Topics: Training
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Podcast: Predicting Market Outcomes
Paul talks with our friends Derek Lundsten and Todd Staples about Immersion Neuroscience and it’s ability to accurately predict market outcomes.
Measuring Live Meeting Engagement
"The challenge with meeting engagement is that it’s really, really tough to measure. Conference planners look at session attendance, session polling, social media buzz, post-event surveys, and more. But understanding the impact that certain ideas, speakers, or live-event environments have on attendees is an inexact science. That just might be changing. Immersion Neuroscience, a company founded by neuroscientist Paul Zak, has a wearable technology that measures immersion in live experiences and video content."
Meetings Today Podcast with Bishop-McCann powered by Immersion
Meetings Today’s Tyler Davidson talks with Bishop-McCann’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Tracy Kinsey and Paul Zak of Immersion Neuroscience on using the Immersion Neuroscience software to measure the return on experience in the events/meeting space.
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Bishop-McCann Return on Experience powered by Immersion
Bishop-McCann powered by Immersion Neuroscience has now created: Return on Experience.
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How Our Brains Decide When to Trust
Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible. It is also a hallmark of high-performing organizations. Employees in high-trust companies are more productive, are more satisfied with their jobs, put in greater discretionary effort, are less likely to search for new jobs, and even are healthier than those working in low-trust companies. Businesses that build trust among their customers are rewarded with greater loyalty and higher sales. And negotiators who build trust with each other are more likely to find value-creating deals.
Topics: featured
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Visitamos las nuevas oficinas de Accenture
El pasado miércoles 5 de junio, estuvimos en las oficinas de Accenture Argentina en el barrio porteño de Parque Patricios.
