Teen brains may be the next hit-makers

RECORD COMPANY bosses might want to sit down for this one – a new study in the US suggests that looking at the brain activity of teenagers as they listen to a piece of music may help predict whether that track will be a flop among a wider audience.

The research looked at brain responses to to music in adolescents and teens with a view to studying peer pressure. Using functional MRI, the researchers looked at brain activity in 27 participants aged between 12 and 17 as they listened to little-known songs.

Some time later, while watching reality TV show American Idolwith his children, a researcher on the study spotted that one of the songs had become a hit.

“I said, ‘Hey, we used that song in our study,’” recalls Gregory Burns in a release from Emory University. “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.”

Digging into the data and comparing it with sales figures for the songs, the researchers found correlations between the brain responses in the teens and how well the songs went on to fare among the music-buying public: in particular, it highlighted a relationship between a weak response in the brain’s reward centre and the songs that went on to flop.

“It’s not quite a hit-predictor,” Berns cautions, stressing that it is a small study. “But we did find a significant correlation between the brain responses in this group of adolescents and the number of songs that were ultimately sold.

"We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity." The findings are to be published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology.