Can Our Brain Predict Item Popularity?

What taste do you prefer more? Pepsi? Coke? Can you tell the difference between the two or are you choosing based on what your peers like? Or maybe the label? Or do you really honestly and genuinely enjoy one more than the other? How about a singer? Whose song is going to be a #1 hit this year? Scientists started to get curious about the pleasure response in our brains. If people’s brains activated more for one thing than the other could brain scans predict which thing was more popular? They did this experiment using songs. They tested a number of young adolescents in an MRI scanner and started playing a variety of music clips that people downloaded from social networks. While listening to the each song, the intensity of brain activation was measured as well as the subject’s personal rating of the song itself. They then started focusing on the parts of the brain whose activity was correlated with the subject’s likability of the song.

After waiting for years, they separated the songs they played during the scans into songs that became extremely popular, songs that became somewhat popular and songs that just never made it to the radio and then they tried to match it up with the amount of activation they caused a part of the brain. Did brain activation correlate with how popular a song became? The closest area that came close to predicting top hits was the nucleus accumbens although it is not the highest of correlations. I did a little more research on the nucleus accumbens since the experiment in the article stated that the study was not designed to specify how this brain structure did that.

It has been proven with PET scans that our brains activate to music. Anyone who has done a little more extensive research on music effects on brain might also have read that our brain is selective in the type of music we choose to like or dislike (which was what started the idea for the experiment above). Our brain produces the ability to put reward value on music that we enjoy because songs can evoke positive (or negative) feelings. These feelings of emotional responses increases and decreases the blood flow of the cerebrum which harbors our arousal, emotion and motivation systems. Coincidentally the same location where other heavenly feelings and senses are induced, such as food, sex and drugs. Not surprisingly the nucleus accumbens resides in the brain as a key part of the mesolimbic pathway, a system that deals with a particular neurotransmitter..can you guess? ......Dopamine! No surprise there.

If the above experiment did not induce any enthusiasm in you, then I couldn’t agree with you more. The experiment itself, I believe, only proved that we could just predict hit songs just by simply asking someone if they liked the song or not and tallied up what the majority’s favorite. Besides the experiement did mention that they also asked the subjects their own person rating on the song. But the findings of this experiment did spark an idea . The article did mention that the study was indeed a valuable and compelling study in neuromarketing. Maybe the focus should have not been towards songs. Besides there was an array of things that could of skewed the experiment like having a small nonrepresentative sample, picking songs from one source, subject bias..etc.

This same experiment could be reconstructed in a way where a subject’s choice interference such as “wanting to like or dislike a product”, subject bias, picking according to label of product and not actual product itself etc, could be discluded from the experiment. This could be done by placing two different products, into two identical unlabeled containers, having a subject try both and rate which one they like better while doing a scan on the brain. Then at the end of the experiment, they can be given a questionaire in which they can consciously choose which brand name they would prefer. Compare their results. If the results are positively correlated, then competing companies can know that passing out surveys might be just as reliable as the brain scan.

Actually, the reason why this experiment was significant was because large companies want to know if people really do enjoy their product much more than the competing company’s products and many are willing to pay the big bucks to prove this scientifically to the world. Sure, this might not be such great news to most scientists striving to find the cure to Alzheimer’s or anyother neurodegenerative disease, but it is awesome news to the marketing industries and future advertising strategies. In fact big companies, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi are leaning toward techniques such as neuromarketing and neuroeconomics to learn more about the consumer’s brain and how our brain, rather than our spoken opinions, respond to their products. They spend millions of dollars on techniques to make sure that our brain responds to their advantage as indicated in this youtube vid. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swy0jAaECxk Don’t get me wrong, big brand name companies have been using the brain to up their sales for years! Just google : subliminal messaging in advertisments. I just thought it might be interesting to see where all this could lead to in some distant future..imagine a high tech robot with a mini brain scanner in the palm of her hand “You voice that your preference would be a maroon BMW but activity level in your the nucleus accumbens suggest an 80% probability that your actual preference is this silver Mercedes.”

Article can be read here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-scans-predict-pop-hits&page=2

Further research http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693452/pdf/15590614.pdf

Supermemory linked with OCD

Without a doubt, the brain’s capabilities of memory can be both fascinating and flawed at the same time. For college students, the sheer amount of facts and knowledge we have to remember for exams, quizzes, and other assignments can be astronomically high. Constantly we have important dates, meetings and deadlines that we must remember to make a positive and lasting impression on others. Although the amount of information our brain can store into the long term may be infinite, the initial encoding and maintenance can truly show the immense flaws that accompany our memory system. We have all experienced how easily it is to forget another person’s name or the phone number for our favorite local pizza place. Times when correct and accurate memory is needed, such as a crime scene, can often fail those who were present at the scene. Crime scene investigators and witnesses often battle false or corrupted memories when faced with decisions of determining perpetrators of crimes.

In addition to false memories, different memories often exist between those who witness the same event. Often, arguments between friends can arise when both individuals see an event but both remember the even in a unique and different way. This is often the case when my friends and I play basketball. “I swear that last shot was a 3 pointer!!!” It is clear that some people have great memories and can remember distinct events from their past, while others scratch their head at the question, “What did you have for dinner last night?” Are there differences in bran anatomy in those with excellent memory capabilities compared with those with terrible memory capabilities?

This exact question was examined by researchers Aurora LePort and Larry Cahill from University of California, Irvine. Classic studies on memory have always taken the perspective as memory being accompanied with deficit. In this case, researchers LePort and Cahill took memory into the perspective as being a superior device that can aid in expansion of knowledge and perception. In this study, after interviewing several candidates and eliminating those that did not exemplify extreme autobiographical memory, researchers were left with 11 candidates. To establish what is meant by extreme off the chart autobiographical memory, Laura Sanders writes, “These people could effortlessly remember, for instance, what they were doing on November 2, 1989, and could also tell you that it was a Thursday.”

All 11 subjects participated in brain scans which revealed larger areas of the brain associated with memory, including left temporoparietal junction and, left posterior insula, and lentiform nucleus. What is most interesting, however, is the link the lentiform nucleus shares with both supermemory and obsessive compulsive disorder. Although the subjects were not tested for obsessive compulsive disorder, researchers hypothesize that the subjects use the organization of their memories by date as a mechanism to relieve stress. After reading this I automatically started to think about how our ability to recognize faces is linked to expertise and practice. Since we constantly interact with people on a daily basis, our ability to recognize faces comes as a skill rather than innate. Perhaps for those who experience stress by lack of organization of thoughts and memories, expertise in organizing memories by date contribute to the skill these individuals acquire over a long period of time. This skill, I feel, can only be learned by the select few who experience anxiety when lack of organization of memories exists. However, this does pose interesting questions of how memory may be able to become improved by learned skill and practice. There are several methods to improving memory such as mnemonic devices, repetition, and Hebian learning strategies. What I am most curious though, are strategies that can improve memory in high stress situations, such as crime scenes, when the most unexpected things can happen. All in all, Cahill and LePort’s study opens up the field of supermemory and approaches the topic in a new way.

Article can be read at: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336082/title/Exceptional_memory_linked_to_bulked-up_parts_of_brain