"Our results revealed characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with Gangnam Style". So say the authors of a new paper called
Neural correlates of the popular music phenomenon.
The authors, Qiaozhen Chen et al. from Zhejiang in China, used fMRI to record brain activity while 15 volunteers listened to two musical pieces: Psy's 'Gangnam Style' and a "light music" control, Richard Clayderman's piano piece 'A Comme Amour'. Chen et al. say that Gangnam Style was associated with "significantly increased fMRI BOLD signals in the bilateral superior temporal cortices, left cerebellum, left putamen and right thalamus cortex". They conclude that these results reveal something about the mechanisms for the "Gangnam Style-induced" positive emotional response. But I don't.
For one thing, only the temporal cortex blobs survive multiple comparisons correction (see their Table 1), but there's an even bigger problem: the stimuli are poorly matched. The two songs used differ in many ...
