A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity

Citation: Gregory Berns, Sara E. Moore (2010/12/17) A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity
Download: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1742971
Tagged: popularity (RSS), fmri (RSS), music (RSS)

Summary

32 subjects evaluated 60 songs while under fMRI. The songs were relatively unknown (only one sold 500k), downloaded from MySpace. Sales information for each song was gathered from Soundscan.

Activation of the cuneus, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens (NACC) were correlated with subject reports of liking songs. Only activation of NACC was correlated with sales. Reports of liking songs not correlated with sales.