As long as there have been agencies placing ads in media, ad executives have been trying to understand how they influenced the way consumers think, feel and ultimately behave in relation to brands. In Madison Avenue's earliest days, they simply relied on their gut, but as advertising grew less novel and media more fragmented and cluttered, the advertising industry has sought better and more scientific methods to get inside the mind of consumers. Initially, those efforts relied on social sciences like psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and its modern day buzzword - ethnography. Coupled with sophisticated survey methods, the rise of …

As far as brains go, Barry Fischer has a pretty good one, and he's been using it to try and understand the way other people think about media and then to get them to think differently about it. Unlike some people on Madison Avenue, the brains Fischer tries to influence are not those of consumers, but the ones who use media to influence how consumers think about media, advertising and brands. For more than a decade, Fischer has been trying to rewire the way Madison Avenue's brain works.

It's true: Advertisers lie. But here's another fact: so do consumers. Anyone who's ever monitored a focus group can tell you that. Maybe it's not lying of the shameless "It was like that when I got here" variety. It's more the "I base my grocery-buying decisions on nutrition, not packaging" kind of fibs. But either way, it's misleading and advertisers pay the price for it.

Knowing what I know about my brain now, it would be difficult for me to say when I first realized Dr. Carl Marci would be the perfect guest editor for this issue, but at least I know where it happened. Not geographically, but anatomically. It happened somewhere in my hippocampus, the region of the brain where important memories form and are stored. Actually, as Dr. Marci explains, the thought of having him guest edit this issue most likely happened in several areas of my brain, including its emotional and empathy parts, as well as the mirror neurons that are part …

The idea that human beings are passive consumers of media content and advertising that can be transformed into "rational" actors who behave predictably in efficient markets is dead. We know now that people are far more complex, adapting to a dynamic and rapidly evolving world that is being transformed all the time because of media. Just consider that in the time it took for you to read those two sentences, billions of new impressions of media content were created and distributed across a global array of media platforms vying for the attention of billions of people. Billions of complex and …

I'd like to begin this article with a little experiment and I need your help to complete it. All you need to do is read a short sentence. But you will need to read it six-times faster than you normally do. And you will need to read at that pace from the moment the sentence begins to the period that punctuates its end.

It's been said that it's the fate of every medium to be devoured by its offspring. Screens have been devouring their parents at increasingly faster rates and we've sat in front of them watching, as they multiplied from the one we all gathered around in theaters, to the one we all gathered around in living rooms, to ones we all carry around in our pockets. Through it all we've watched them with rapt attention. It's about time the screens returned the favor.