The Joys of Unpredictability, The Unjoys of Pop-Ups, Etc. takes

If a commercial has a surprise ending, will this predispose viewers to like the brand? So we might hypothesize, based on new brain research published in The Journal of Neuroscience (as summarized in The New York Times). The researchers scanned their subjects’ brains as these intrepid souls received squirts of fruit juice or water in predictable and unpredictable patterns. It turns out the brains’ pleasure centers perked up significantly more when the squirts were administered in unpredictable patterns.