Measure your brain by listening to your body.

This revolutionary discovery led to a couple of books (The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works and Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies), and a very popular TED talk  with nearly 2 million views.

Dr. Zak also appeared on television many times (including as Dr. Love on the Bachelor!). As a result, our co-founder got pretty famous in the field. 

He's even credited as the founder of neuroeconomics and the most cited scientist in the world of neuromarketing. 

Soon after Dr. Zak's team discovered the oxytocin-behavior relationship, they got funding from the US government to investigate whether combinations of signals in the brain could predict behaviors in high-stakes environments, like the battlefield. 

The only requirements were that the method of measurement must be scalable in the field, and it had to be validated by a 3rd party academic lab.

This kicked off several years of methodical research where our founding team of scientists measured over 140 neural signals simultaneously. 

Dr. Zak's team measured EEG, fMRI, electrodermal activity, facial coding, reflexes, breath analyzers, laser beams, (more) blood draws, and changes in cardiac rhythm.

As behavioral neuroscientists, it wasn't enough to measure a "state."  They were looking for a way to predict people’s decisions and behaviors.  Once our team found that oxytocin and dopamine are the core parts of the brain’s emotional valuation network, they traced out their effects on the brain’s “output file”—the cranial nerves.  Some of these pass through the heart, subtly changing its rhythms.

We wrote some algorithms and figured out how to listen to these changes in the heart to infer the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain.  We convolved the dopamine and oxytocin responses to maximize predictive accuracy into a wholly new measure: Immersion.

To be clear, neither heart rate nor heart rate variability are predictive—we’re measuring higher-order changes from the activity of the cranial nerves.  Once we knew we could predict behavior using medical grade equipment, we did the heavy lifting to bring this capability to normal smart watches and fitness sensors.

In 2017 Dr. Paul Zak and Dr. Jorge Barraza co-founded Immersion.  They hired two of the original researcher team members to help and brought in super successful startup founder Scott Brown to serve as CEO.  The rest, as they say, is history! 

The best part is that Immersion's metrics have been proven to predictive and meaningful in thousands of subscriber use cases. This includes predicting in-market behaviors like brand recall, sales, social sharing, and consumer action, as well as out-of-market results like well-being. 

Today, we help content creators, product developers, experience designers, educators, and team leaders create exceptional experiences that guarantee success.  And our new emotional fitness app SIX is changing the world of well-being forever. 

Mordor Intelligence released their Global Neuromarketing growth and trends report.

Immersion Neuroscience is #1!

"Neuromarketing solutions are assisting the process of consumer data in a marketing environment in an extremely effective manner due to the usage of neuroscience techniques. The increasing awareness about the potential benefits offered by these techniques is further driving the adoption of various neuromarketing solutions at a rapid pace. Major companies like PepsiCo, The Weather Channel, eBay, and Diamler have implemented neuromarketing research techniques to conduct market research, run focus groups, and design marketing campaigns.

Various vendors are developing new technological approaches (software, applications, and user interfaces) to enable companies to understand their customers and deliver a tailor-made marketing approach. Brands like Campbell's and Frito-Lay have adopted neuroimaging to reimagine their packaging strategy. Studies have revealed that customers react differently to packaging, with color, text, and imagery influencing their purchase decisions."

In 2021, Immersion partnered with a large broadband connectivity company to continuously measure Immersion for several residents of a retirement community in Texas to see if this data could be used to predict vital emotional well-being outcomes, like mood and energy.

During the study, Immersion data were collected for a set of individuals continuously for three weeks, while mood and energy levels were captured with self-reported daily.  The team then investigated whether the neurophysiologic output from Immersion could predict reported mood and energy levels.

The results were groundbreaking, demonstrating that our two metrics, immersion and safety, predicted mood and energy in this group of individuals with 99% and 96% accuracy when machine learning was applied. This research was published in Brain Sciences in 2022.

Dr. Zak published his third book, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness.  

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"Once again, Dr. Zak has unlocked the secrets to how our brain works and how critical it is for us to learn how to generate and sustain happiness. Through engaging stories and clear insights stripped of any technical jargon, he shows how all of us, especially those of us engaged in business, can craft a deeper, more extraordinary life. If building a high-performance organization interests you, this is a must-read!"

— Doug Rauch, former President of Trader Joe's and Founder of Daily Table

In a groundbreaking 2022 study, continuous neurophysiologic data measured by through Immersion was shown to accurately predict mood and energy levels up to two days in advance for an older population. 

Inspired by this significant finding and responding to the demand from countless participants who wanted to measure their own immersion levels, we launched the ultimate emotional wellness app in 2023. 

SIX helps navigate the everyday, so you can make insightful and transformative decisions on how you spend your time.  SIX also makes it even easier to measure the value you're delivering through your experiences.  Try it Today! 

In August 2024, Frontiers in Digital Health published research demonstrating that the number of troughs and peaks in immersion predicted daily mood and energy with 90% accuracy. 

This research is foundational evidence for the impact of our emotional fitness app, SIX, which empowers individuals to measure and cultivate the key moments, so they can achieve radical fulfillment.