Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative : "A member of the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative at Harvard, an interdisciplinary study group, he meets regularly with experts on human cognition. And he has dabbled with brain scans as a means of testing the effectiveness of advertisements. But he is best known as the creator of ZMET (pronounced ZEE-met), the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique. The first patented marketing research tool in the United States, it represents an unusual attempt to put some of the insights of neuroscience (along with generous helpings of semiotics and Carl Jung) to profitable use as a window into consumer attitudes toward everything from art museums to laundry detergent. Citing prominent scholars of the human brain -- like Steven Pinker and Antonio Damasio -- Mr. Zaltman argues that consumers can't tell you what they think because they just don't know. Their deepest thoughts, the ones that account for their behavior in the marketplace, are unconscious. Not only that, he insists, those thoughts are primarily visual as well. ''Because we represent the outcome of thoughts verbally, it's easy to think that thought occurs in the form of words,'' he said. ''That's just not the case.'' To uncover people's hidden thoughts about the products they use, ZMET relies on visual images. The study Mr. Zaltman conducted for Coca-Cola in Europe last year was typical. Small groups of paid volunteers were asked to spend a week collecting at least a dozen pictures from magazines, catalogs or any other source that captured their feelings about Coca-Cola. Then, they discussed the images during a two-hour private interview with a ZMET specialist. Finally, they created a digital collage with their images and recorded a short text about its meaning."