GlassView Releases New Findings Indicating That 95% of Neural Signals Fail to Predict Consumer Action

NEW YORK, May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- GlassView, the world's largest brain-behavioral intelligence platform, today released its inaugural signal intelligence report whose findings uncover an uncomfortable truth at the heart of brain-powered advertising: Most of what the human brain does when it watches an advertisement is utterly, magnificently useless.

GlassView's findings challenge assumptions about how ads are measured and optimized, like excitement, determined by subjects' elevated heart rates, leads to better performance outcomes. Drawing upon billions of real-time biological signal data points, collected through proprietary headbands embedded with clinical-grade EEG sensors, GlassView found that up to 95% of neural signals, including excitement, warmth and recall, fail to translate into meaningful consumer action.

Instead, the road to more clicks and transactions lay in findings abandoned in the neural signal graveyard: the flat lines and contradictory signals that didn't fit any emotional KPI. On closer examination, many of these signals fell into patterns that correlated with downstream conversion data and purchase behavior.

The analogy to large language model development is precise. Today's frontier AI models are racing toward a trillion parameters, and that scale of apparent waste is not a flaw in the architecture. It is the architecture. The redundancy, the noise, the signals that seem to go nowhere are what allow the most capable models to eventually identify which pathways matter. Over time, the discipline of AI model building shifts from accumulation to pruning: finding the most efficient, energy-effective routes through the network that still produce superior outcomes. GlassView is on the same trajectory. The company currently operates a neural network of more than 140 layers and growing. The neuro noise that its platform now identifies as predictive is the early evidence of pruning at work — the discovery of signal pathways that competitors, who never collected the noise to begin with, will never be able to map.

"The assumption was that the signal was the answer — that if you had maximized positive neural responses among your target audience, you'd done your job. But the signals that seemed to mean nothing may well be the moments when familiarity and integration are occurring, where the unconscious process of brand preference is quietly forming below dashboard metrics."

— J. Brooks, Founder & CEO, GlassView

Case Studies Reveal Unexpected Drivers of Performance

Brooks and team, including GlassView's Chief Neuroscientist and UPenn professor Dr. Michael Platt, tested this hypothesis on campaigns for American Express, Intel and Liquid Death. Platt is also the co-founder of Cogwear, which developed the sensored headbands that GlassView obtained for marketing applications. They ran the campaigns through GlassView Origin, its brain-measurement-powered ad optimization tool, confirming that emotional peaks did not drive lasting real-world actions.

American Express
GlassView tested an ad starring actress and writer Issa Rae in a montage of prestige scenarios, settings that score high for affinity, aspiration and brand warmth. GlassView's brain response data told a more complicated story. Affinity, empathy, joy and recall remained largely flat throughout, and what moved instead was fatigue. The brain was registering the edit, not the emotion. The most notable signal was impulse gauge, which spiked during the reveal of Rae's Platinum card on the check presenter, in context and part of a life already in progress. Brains did not respond to aspiration on command but to permission: that the Platinum Amex belongs in a world viewers already want to inhabit. Yet the spot's emotional architecture pointed at the wrong moments.

Intel
It's widely accepted that B2B advertising operates outside the emotional economy entirely. An Intel spot targeting enterprise technology buyers was tested with prospects, and the assumption was that high-cognitive engagers like logic, credibility and category authority would drive brand sentiment uplift. Yet joy, an emotion more commonly attached to CPG and lifestyle brand ads, outperformed those rational signals. These humans responded to the emotional permission and momentary relief from the pressures of decision-making. The industry often talks about bringing humanity to B2B, and the Intel data suggests this is not an abstract philosophy but a neurological mandate, one that correlates directly with downstream brand sentiment uplift.

Liquid Death
The Liquid Death x Martha Stewart "Dismembered Moments" candle commercial is a collision of brand identities. The funny spot was predicted to win through high recall and joy scores. Instead, synchrony, or the shared cultural incongruity of Martha Stewart touting Liquid Death, produced a powerful, collective emotional event. According to GlassView signal data, collective neural events correlate with the kind of social-sharing behavior that turns a commercial into viral, earned media. The punchline of the spot, the Dismembered Moments candle, a severed hand holding a can of Liquid Death, produced a dip as the brain had already appreciated the joke.

GlassView continues to build long-term datasets to validate how so-called neuro noise correlates with commercial performance and consistently outperforms neuro lift.

"The campaigns and targeting decisions informed by the so-called noise layer of our neural signal have consistently outperformed those built around the peaks. The neuro lift catches the eye. The neuro noise catches the customer. We are in the accumulation phase now. The pruning phase, when we isolate exactly which pathways between brain and behavior drive commercial outcomes, is where the real competitive moat gets built."

— J. Brooks, Founder & CEO, GlassView

About GlassView

GlassView is the world's largest brain-behavioral intelligence platform, translating brain signal into audience intelligence and measurable economic outcomes for the world's most sophisticated brands. The company holds an exclusive media distribution license from Cogwear, a clinical-grade neuroscience company backed by UPenn Medicine, whose sensor technology powers NIH and Alzheimer's detection research. That same hardware infrastructure underpins every GlassView campaign, creating a signal moat no competitor can replicate: human brain signal, collected at scale, validated against real-world commercial outcomes.

GlassView's leadership brings together scientific, cultural, and commercial authority. Dr. Michael Platt, Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Cogwear, serves as Chief Neuroscientist. The company's board includes Renaud Dutreil, former Chairman of LVMH North America, and David Gerbitz, former Chief Operating Officer of Pandora.

GlassView reaches 2.7 billion people, serves 80+ Fortune 100 clients, and is headquartered in Fort Worth with offices in New York, Tokyo, Singapore, London, and Paris.

Media Contact

Frances Alban
Vice President, Mark Allen & Co.
M: (786) 200-4315
[email protected] 

SOURCE GlassView