The Questioning Christian

Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

Written by

D. C. Toedt III

in

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From Eric Asimov, “Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?” NY Times, May 7, 2008:

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Comments

One response to “Our brains can deceive us, even about wine”

  1. R. Eric Sawyer Avatar
    R. Eric Sawyer

    Being intently curious, and skeptical, about research methodology, I wonder what “volunteer wine novices” are, and does it matter for the results. For instance, if they were undergraduate students, who signed up for a study judging wine, and who marked their level of experience as limited, are they nascent wine snobs? Are they more or less likely than the general population to try and imitate the opinions of their supposed betters, as defined by price?
    I suspect that most of us judge our tastes, (and I think possibly more to your point)and our opinions by that community whose tastes and opinions we value. As we identify with them, we either want to pretend that we are like them (Or else no “Vogue” magazine) or pretend they are like us (Or else no “Us” magazine)
    I think in “screwtape” CS Lewis talked about one of the mast Godly, evil-resistant thing a man can do is derive pleasure from an innocent thing, whether it is root-beer or “ripple” or corn chips or bridge, for no other reason than that he likes it.

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