Another interesting twist: When the research subjects were asked to rate the songs on a scale of one to five, their answers did not correlate with future sales

Another interesting twist: When the research subjects were asked to rate the songs on a scale of one to five, their answers did not correlate with future sales of the songs. I think the fact that the fMRI data predicted success, but that the explicit ratings given did not predict success is the interesting part of this. It would be totally uninteresting if you could predict the song's success just from asking people what they like, or how good they think something is. That an fMRI can tell you more about the goodness of the song than the people in the fMRI listening to the music, is pretty cool.