Posted on 12/03/2003 10:39:53 AM PST by weegee
A number of people have told me that the book should have had more hype, that it was entertaining enough, but wasn't going to make a reader charge up and go and tell all his/her friends to start trading in the fashion I advocate (and/or, presumably, buy the book). Possibly true, but I can't write like that, and wouldn't if I could. There's far too much hype and utter nonsense in print already about trading; why add to a pile of crap, eh?
If you've any interest in the subject, I'll be the featured guest on the Sunday Forum at www.marketforum.com, 8pm CST Sunday, Dec 14. No registration required, just jump in (not, of course, that any FReeper would be shy about that!).
Thanks for your interest, and Happy Hols!
That might just work, but you see the Scrooge analogy, right?
Music, of all kinds, has the power to inspire or..... drive people nuts. Hitler, for ex., was VERY cognizant of this, and made sure that music of certain kinds was a part of his rallies.
Excerpt:
Nov. 12 — You ponder a wine to buy for dinner. Two vintages beckon from the store shelf before you. Should you go with the French white or the German? Similar quality. Identical price.
Which to choose?
Recent British research suggests that the music seeping over the store's sound system might just nudge your mind. "If you hear French music, you should be primed to buy French wine," says Adrian North, a psychology lecturer at the University of Leicester in England who, along with his collaborators, borrowed part of an aisle at the local supermarket to set up just such an experiment.
North and company took four shelves in the wine section and split each in half. A French wine filled one side. A German counterpart filled the other.
A tape deck sat on the top shelf.
Just Beautiful Music
Just as North suspected, the buyers followed the lead of the music. When the tape deck wafted French accordion tunes down the aisle, shoppers bought a total of 40 French wines and only eight German wines. On days when the pounding beat of a German oompah band greeted shoppers, they bought only 12 French wines but 22 bottles of German wine.
"I think it's just a very solid piece of applied research," comments Vladimir Konecni, a psychologist at University of California San Diego who has researched how music affects people's emotions.
For the Leicester researchers, the results, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, came as an expected surprise.
"Besides being psychologists, we're still human beings," North says. "We were surprised on a personal level. On a psychological level, it's exactly what you would expect." <
The scientists suggest French music triggers thoughts and memories associated with France and thus makes people more likely to buy French wine. Ditto for German music and German wines.
Of the 44 customers who agreed to answer a questionnaire, though, only six admitted the music played a part in their wine decision. "You could argue music has some kind of subliminal influence that people aren't aware of," North says. "I think it's much more likely a second explanation. People just didn't like to admit that they bought wine that happened to coincide with the music that was playing."
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