What makes videos like the one above go viral? To answer the question, Nicholas Hune-Brown looks into research investigating what the “buzzy,” trend-predicting brain looks like:
[P]sychologists recruited 19 undergraduates and asked them to pretend they were interns at a TV studio. With their brains hooked up to an fMRI machine, which measured activity in various neurocognitive networks, they then read through ideas for TV pilots and decided whether or not to pass the pitches on to their “producers” (79 other students). After the scan was over, the interns created video interviews about each pilot idea, rating the pitches. The videos were sent to the producers, who then had to decide whether or not they would recommend the pitch to other individuals. A pitch that the producers approved of, an idea that had been successfully passed from one person out into the wider world, was “buzzy.” …
The researchers found that when encountering a future viral hit, people who were able to successfully create buzz showed significant activity in the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ.
There was more activity in the TPJ compared to people who weren’t able to convince the producers—poor pushers of viral content—and compared to themselves, when they were reading a dud of a pitch.
The TPJ is part of the brain’s “mentalizing network,” which we use to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. It’s the part of the brain that sparks during successful conversations, when we’re trying to figure out how to communicate, or when we read a book and try to put ourselves in the mind of the main character. While reading the most successful pitches, the interns weren’t just concerned about enjoying a pitch themselves—they were anticipating what others might enjoy. The people most able to make something “go viral” were those who instantly began thinking about how to make the information useful to a larger community.
He glimpses the future:
As my editor said, it’s easy to see where this is going: a dystopian, Philip K. Dickian future in which BuzzFeed is edited by a group of precogs endlessly fed story ideas—“tiny salamanders wearing tiny capes,” “tiny mice riding medium-sized frogs”—while researchers hover above, waiting for the TPJ to light up like a slot machine with the next viral hit.
The Dish 