Science
Are you planning to quit smoking? Researchers have found a way to predict how successful your venture will be. They did this using magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, looking for activity in areas that are associated with behavioral changes.
The study scanned the brains of 28 heavy smokers who joined the anti-smoking campaign. Participants in the experiment were asked to watch a series of commercials about how harmful smoking is and how important it is to quit smoking, while a special device scanned their brain activity.
After each video, volunteers talked about how it influenced their intention to quit, whether it increased their desire to quit, and how much they believed in the video. Almost all people whose brains were active in the medial prefrontal cortex during the videos stopped smoking within one month after the experiment, regardless of whether they were talked about the impact of the video on them.
“It is interesting that knowing what is happening in the human brain during the video, we are twice as likely to predict the future behavior of this individual as if we relied only on words about the intention to quit smoking and a person's own assessment of their abilities,” said Emily Falk, lead author of the study. “It seems that our brains can actually provide information that introspection doesn't always provide.”
She stressed that future plans to identify the exact correspondence between the effectiveness of phrases in videos and brain activity.