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。

　　一项“意外研究”偶然揭示了一个现象，那就是青少年的潜意识可以帮助预测新歌曲的流行程度。关于“同龄压力”如何影响我们在音乐上的偏好的研究是这样的，在实验对象听他们从未听过的歌曲的时候观察他们的脑部运动从而得到结论。多年以后，由于巧合，当年他们所听过的某些旋律成为流行歌曲时，科学家们可以在当他们听如今成为流行曲的歌曲时，找到实验者之间的共同特征。

　　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。

　　更令人吃惊的是，无论当事人的喜好如何，实验结果都是出奇的一致。那些喜欢这些曲调的和不喜欢这些曲调的人，他们的大脑以同样的一种潜意识方式去反应。“我们已经科学地证明了，你可以在一定程度上运用一组人的神经影像来预测文化的流行程度。”Gregory Berns如是说，他是研究神经影像的Emory中心的神经科经济学家兼编辑。

　　The report, conducted by Berns and Sarah Moore, an economics research specialist, is being published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.In 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和一名经济学研究专家Sarah Moore所研究得到的报告已经在消费者心理学杂志上出版了。在2006年，Berns的实验室从音乐网站MySpace上面挑选了120首不同的歌曲。所有的曲子都是出自没有录音合同的相对陌生的音乐家。有27名年龄在12到17岁的实验对象参与了此项研究，他们在听这些歌曲的同时，他们的神经系统反应通过功能性磁分辨率成像被记录下来。

　　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。

　　研究者也给每首歌设定了从1到5的五个等级，那些实验对象需根据他们对某首歌有多么喜好来给歌曲评级。这个研究的最初的目的是研究同侪压力能在多大程度上影响青少年的决定，这也就是为什么Berns的团队选择那些研究对象们以前不太可能听到的歌曲的原因。

　　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.'

　　三年之后，Berns惊喜地听到了当年他们曾经选出来的一首歌。当Kris Allen在美国偶像上开始唱One Republic的'Apologize'的时候，他激动地说：“我们曾经将这首歌用于我们的研究！“他还说道：“一个想法浮现于我的脑海中，那就是我们拥有这些孩子在这些歌曲流行之前听这些歌的大脑反应的独一无二数据集合，我开始去怀疑我们是否可以去预测新歌曲的流行。”

　　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.'

　　对比分析表明，在衡量歌曲在2007年至2010年的销售数字时，神经数据对于歌曲流行程度的预测效果非常显著。