Your Brain On Celebrity Gossip
Whether it’s Justin Bieber crashing his car or Kanye having another Grammys tantrum, celebrity gossip is always in the news. We love it and the media serves it up. But these days, such truisms aren’t enough. You have to measure an aspect of human behavior in the brain scanner to show it’s the case scientifically. That’s what a group of Chinese researchers have done for a paper just published in the journal Social Neuroscience. While the subjects claimed there was nothing especially entertaining about negative celebrity gossip, a part of their brain known to be involved in the experience of pleasure (the caudate nucleus) was extra active when they heard stories of movie stars doing naughty things.
