But for Artie Bulgrin, ESPN senior vice president of research and analytics, having lab-coated clinicians hook electrodes to viewers to measure "arousal" has promise. "One thing we have in mind for ESPN going forward is to use all these tools for how we report, do interviews, produce features," he says. "We can test executions in the lab to produce best practices for our (on-air) content."

We are not making this up. Disney opened its Disney Media & Advertising Lab in Austin, Texas, in December, although the building isn't identified with Disney. "It's important to leave it completely anonymous," says Bulgrin, "so it won't have any biasing effect." (Anybody reading this in Austin, tell no one! But given the lab tests subjects at a rate of 65,000 per year, somebody might squeal.)

Bulgrin, part of an ESPN presentation on the lab this week for advertisers in New York, says subjects watch TV in "environments that simulate living rooms" as their eye movements, heart rate and skin perspiration are tracked in great detail.

Sensors for "skin conductivity," says Bulgrin, check for "almost imperceptible amount of perspiration, which you might not feel but the probes can identify." At the ad briefing, Duane Varan, the lab's director, says goggles tracking eye movement are "so precise that we've been able to use them to map the viewers eyes as they read each word on a mobile phone screen." Says Varan: "New psycho-physiological tools are helping us dig deeper and deeper into the psyche of the viewer. … We have access to a deeper level of truth, because the body doesn't lie."

ESPN also has ways of making people talk, like using traditional focus groups. But Bulgrin notes clinical research discovers things nobody could confess to even if they tried. For advertisers worried viewer eyeballs might spend too much time focused on the network's onscreen news ticker during ads, ESPN reports that happens during only 12.6% of ad time.

So, do lab subjects give each other electric shocks to see who ends up with TV remotes? Says Bulgrin, chuckling: "We don't force anybody to do that."

But ESPN might test putting food-pellet dispensers on couches to reward good viewing.