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SCIENTISTS now understand a lot more about our inner secrets and habits than we realise or may be comfortable with.

Over the past decade, boosted by intrusive technologies such as improved brain-scanning machines and CCTV cameras, and mass observation through the internet, there has been a leap forwards in the scientific study of everyday life.

For example, scientists know by mounting cameras in supermarkets that when we walk through a door, our natural instinct is to look left and turn right. They also know that the convenience stores which place beer next to nappies on their shelves sell lots more alcohol. Men may not do much changing of nappies, it seems, but are more likely to be sent out on emergency missions to buy more.

Other tests seem more akin to reality TV than science: in the infamous “Good Samaritan” tests, volunteers hurrying to deliver a homily on that biblical text walked around ‘injured” people lying on the pavement. Much new research suggests we are not as agreeable as we hope.

Around the world scientists are testing the “game theory” developed by John Nash — the mathematician played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind — by watching TV game-show contestants as they pick between different strategies to win.

Professor Ian Walker divides his time between teaching economics at Warwick University and studying players on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It is a cheap way, he said, of analysing how ordinary people balance risk against possible reward: at which point do they stop gambling on their skills to answer the questions and bank their accumulated loot?

Walker said that Britain’s most successful game show is more than just an entertainment: it generates data which can help the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to judge how much people are putting aside for a rainy day and how much more he must find for future state pensions.

The scientific study of personality and choice says how we treat money comes from deep within our genetic heritage: studies at Harvard include capuchin monkeys who use silver discs to buy toys, fruit and even sex from fellow primates. The observers call this “testing price theory”.

Hollywood studios are also employing psychologists and economists to steer through the current box office depression. Later this month Steven Soderbergh, director of Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve, will release Bubble, a small-budget drama, simultaneously at American multiplexes, on DVD and on pay-per-view television.

“It’s an experiment to see how the movie fan jumps,” said a studio consultant. “If more people choose the DVD over the theatre, then studios will reduce the wait between multiplex and DVD to a few weeks, or maybe days. More cinemas will close. This is mass psychology in the real world, far more sophisticated than it was a generation ago, and it is not pretty.”

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YET scientists still believe that music remains a unique road into the soul, if only because we are now surrounded by so much of it. A century ago all music was live, from whistling in the street to grand opera, but now the average student owns four days of music on CD or iPod.

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