Despite the rapidly changing society and decades of reform in education systems around the globe, it seems that, the practices and policies of our educational system have not changed considerably.

Neuroscience can help us understand how students think and how they can efficiently acquire knowledge.

Nowadays we need educational policies that will foster what is required in the new global economy: creativity, innovation, originality, flexibility of ideas, critical thinking and problem solving.

It seems that everything should be changed: curriculum (what we teach), instruction (how we teach it), environment (where we teach it), assessment (how we measure what we teach), and teachers’ training and development.

This article aims at describing how Neuromarketing can be important for the understanding of what is going on when the 21^st century students think, learn, and memorize and how teachers can exploit this to perform better.

Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing. It includes the use of brain imaging, scanning, or other brain activity measurement technology to measure a subject's response to specific products, packaging, advertising, or other marketing elements. It also includes the use of neuroscience research in marketing, using FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) or other techniques.

Nowadays, with the use of Neuromarketing in the marketing and selling process, the most important challenge

for companies is to stick to ethical principles when performing their investigations. That’s why it would be more ethical to use Neuromarketing for a noble cause, namely education.

University professors are all aware today how difficult teaching becomes. Students are more demanding, they are confronted everyday to powerful branding messages and to instantaneous communication and messaging, if our instructional methods don’t change, they may become increasingly ineffective in the competition of 21^st century students.

That’s why we need to know those students, to prepare for them the best teaching methods and the best material, and to present it to them in the best ‘packaging’ , to do so we need the help of both marketing and science.

Marketers know how to manipulate people’s thoughts and feeling towards a topic. Teachers could use that ‘to manipulate’ a learner into thinking, into ‘getting’ and ‘keeping’ the attention.

One barrier that may hinder education from adopting more marketing techniques is that some professors believe their job is to present the materials and that it’s the student’s job to show up motivated and ready to learn. At the same time, a marketer starts with the assumption that their potential customers probably have no inherent interest in the product being sold and that the marketer must create that interest and tie the product to aspects of the customer’s life in some positive and meaningful way.

I do think it would be interesting to do some FMRI comparisons of different teachers using different teaching techniques and see how students react to these methods. Such a study would provide some guidance in developing best practices.