(Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock) Chased fanatically but realized rarely, a truly viral story seems to happen purely by chance — a fortuitous alignment of trending topic, clever headline, compelling copy and maybe a witty GIF. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has built a model for "virality" by identifying neural mechanisms at work when people decide to share an article or not. In two studies, of 41 and 39 people each, they used fMRI to monitor participants' brain activity as they rated how likely they were to share articles drawn from the New York Times health section. In doing so, they found they could predict the popularity of an article based on activity in the brain.
Media institutions from the New York Times on down have invested considerable resources into understanding the ingredients that imbue stories with viral zest, and a few basic tenets have emerged. People like ...
