Neuromarketing, coined by a marketing professor at Erasmus University, is the use of neuroscience to better understand how our brain reacts to advertising, brands and products.

On a recent Wednesday night, Eleanor Phipp spent and hour watching commercial television. Nothing unusual about that–except that Phipp, 30, was in a dark room at a South London medical center, lying inside a loudly whirring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner that mapped her brain as video…