Gino Robair posted a link to a news story (an excerpt of which appears
below) about a scientist using MRI to further explain/understand the
results of the old-school "Pepsi Challenge" ad campaign.

i know what you're thinking: "It's about time!!! Thank god SOMEONE is
doing this fine work!"

anyway, the results are actually pretty interesting and cause me to
ponder a few things that have been propsed in the analog vs. digital
debates over the years...but first the excerpt:

"When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read
Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine,
has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for
instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from
the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste
test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not
long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't
taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for
a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test
subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I.
machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of
the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke
in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings
of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral
putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in
people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as
active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague
tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by
repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he
announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was
remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's
more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was
also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain
that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently,
the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste
of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a
word, its brand -- to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague
reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far
fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was
impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific
precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste
buds."

maybe it's just because i'm a nerd, but it just sparked the idea of
some of the parallels of the great analog/digital debacle: some claim
one is favored because people associate it with fond memories, some
say one's just plain better than the other, even though their flavors
are distinct some people can't tell the two apart, some don't care and
just have whatever's available, some say one's a classic and the other
is the choice of a new generation...etc...

it would be very interesting to do similar tests with both recording
mediums and see what the results would be. especially with different
age groups. younger kids who've grown up on CD and MP3 vs. people who
grew up on vinyl, cassetes, reel-to-reel and so on...at AES Bob Ludwig
gave a great impromptu talk going through the history of digital tape
machines and as an aside at one point delivered an anecdote about an
artist whose record he was mastering who had been listening to the
final mixes on MP3 before mastering and when Mr. Ludwig played the
mastered record for him, he wanted to know why the high-end sounded so
"weird"...he wanted it to sound more like the MP3s he'd become
accustomed to...i guess for many people it's not really what's
"better" it's more what you're used to or have an
emotional/intellectual bias towards...