潛意識好神奇 可預測歌曲是否會走紅

An 'accidental study' has revealed that teenagers' subconscious can help predict the popularity of new songs. Research into how peer pressure impacts on our musical preferences looked at brain Movements while the subjects were listening to music they have never heard before. Years later - when some of the tunes they listened to had, by coincidence, become hits - scientists identified common features between the subjects when they were listening to the tunes that would go on to be popular.

一項“意外研究”偶然揭示了一個現象，那就是青少年的潛意識可以幫助預測新歌曲的流行程度。關於“同齡壓力”如何影響我們在音樂上的偏好的研究是這樣的，在實驗對象聽他們從未聽過的歌曲的時候觀察他們的腦部運動從而得到結論。多年以後，由於巧合，當年他們所聽過的某些旋律成爲流行歌曲時，科學家們可以在當他們聽如今成爲流行曲的歌曲時，找到實驗者之間的共同特徵。

Even more startlingly, the results were the same whatever the subjects' personal preferences were. The brains of both those who like the tunes, and those who didn't, reacted in the same subconscious way. 'We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity,' says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory's Center for Neuropolicy.

更令人吃驚的是，無論當事人的喜好如何，實驗結果都是出奇的一致。那些喜歡這些曲調的和不喜歡這些曲調的人，他們的大腦以同樣的一種潛意識方式去反應。“我們已經科學地證明了，你可以在一定程度上運用一組人的神經影像來預測文化的流行程度。”Gregory Berns如是說，他是研究神經影像的Emory中心的神經科經濟學家兼編輯。

The report, conducted by Berns and Sarah Moore, an economics research specialist, is being published in the Journal of Consumer 2006, Berns' lab selected 120 songs from music website MySpace. All the tunes were by relatively unknown musicians without recording contracts. Twenty-seven research subjects, aged 12 to 17, listened to the songs while their neural reactions were recorded through functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI). 功能性磁分辨率成像

由Berns和一名經濟學研究專家Sarah Moore所研究得到的報告已經在消費者心理學雜誌上出版了。在2006年，Berns的實驗室從音樂網站MySpace上面挑選了120首不同的歌曲。所有的曲子都是出自沒有錄音合同的相對陌生的音樂家。有27名年齡在12到17歲的實驗對象參與了此項研究，他們在聽這些歌曲的同時，他們的神經系統反應通過功能性磁分辨率成像被記錄下來。

The subjects were also asked to rate how much they liked each song on a scale of one to five. The initial intention was to study how much peer pressure influences teenagers' decisions - which is why Berns' team chose music their subjects were unlikely to have heard before.

研究者也給每首歌設定了從1到5的五個等級，那些實驗對象需根據他們對某首歌有多麼喜好來給歌曲評級。這個研究的最初的目的是研究同儕壓力能在多大程度上影響青少年的決定，這也就是爲什麼Berns的團隊選擇那些研究對象們以前不太可能聽到的歌曲的原因。

Three years later, Berns was surprised to hear one of the tunes they had chosen - when Kris Allen started singing 'Apologize' by One Republic on American Idol.'I said, "Hey, we used that song in our study,"' Berns recalls. 'It occurred to me that we had this unique data set of the brain responses of kids who listened to songs before they got popular. I started to wonder if we could have predicted that hit.'

三年之後，Berns驚喜地聽到了當年他們曾經選出來的一首歌。當Kris Allen在美國偶像上開始唱One Republic的'Apologize'的時候，他激動地說：“我們曾經將這首歌用於我們的研究！“他還說道：“一個想法浮現於我的腦海中，那就是我們擁有這些孩子在這些歌曲流行之前聽這些歌的大腦反應的獨一無二數據集合，我開始去懷疑我們是否可以去預測新歌曲的流行。”

A comparative analysis revealed that the neural data had a statistically significant prediction rate for the popularity of the songs, as measured by their sales figures from 2007 to 2010.'

對比分析表明，在衡量歌曲在2007年至2010年的銷售數字時，神經數據對於歌曲流行程度的預測效果非常顯著。