The day after I talked with Lanier at his home, we drove together to the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a new virtual-reality lab on the Stanford campus.

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Facebook is basically the best human research lab ever.

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Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has demonstrated that subjects' brains register a preference for Coke or Pepsi that correlates with the product they choose in blind taste tests. (His study is not funded by the cola giants.) The brain of "Subject P" on the monitor in the Human Neuroimaging Lab, for instance, shows he is a Pepsi lover.

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