The always great Steven Levy filed a story at Backchannel about Twitter usage measured by neuroscience, which revealed greater stimulation of emotion and memory in test subjects than they displayed during more general web use. Not surprising, since personal engagement is more intense in tweets than on newsfeeds, even personalized ones. Clearly such info can be, for better or worse, used by the company for neuromarketing purposes. An excerpt:

Then, during 45-minute sessions, they alternated between normal Web-surfing activities and using Twitter — reading their timelines, tweeting, and other birdy stuff.

Graham had hoped that the brain profiles of people using Twitter would show the difference between his employer and more static Web use. “When I go on Twitter, oftentimes I really get sucked into it,” he says. “I get this strong anticipation to see what engagement is going to be.” But he admits that he had no idea what the data would actually show.

The results were more than he’d dreamed of. The study first tried to measure a neural signature that tends to correlate with information relating to you—a “sense of personal relevance.” It did this by comparing how participants’ brains activated when either passively scrolling and browsing on Twitter, actively tweeting and retweeting, or engaging in normal online activity. The brain data suggested that passive Twitter use increased a sense of personal relevance by 27 percent. Active use boosted that number to 51 percent. The representative from NeuroInsight told Twitter that in all the testing the research company has done, there’s been only one result as high: when people opened personal mail. (The physical kind.)

The most dramatic results reflected emotional intensity.•