I love these experiments, if only because everyone assumes that the basic finding doesn't apply to them. It's only these other simpletons who can't tell the difference between red and white wine, or cheap plonk and fancy Bordeaux, or strawberry and chocolate yogurt:
In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that strawberry was her favorite flavor and she planned to switch to this new brand.
Here is how I summarized this line of research in my book, which I think has profound implications for how we think about reality (and why naive realism is so 19th century):
Impressions are always incomplete, and require a dash of subjectivity to render them whole. Whenever we bind or parse our sensations what we are really doing is making a judgment about what we think we are sensing. This unconscious act of interpretation is largely driven by contextual cues. If we encounter a sensation in an unusual situation--like the smell of demi-glace in a McDonald's--the brain secretly begins altering its sensory verdict. Our ambiguous inputs are bound together into a different sensation. The fancy scent of veal stock becomes a quarter pounder.Our sense of smell is particularly vulnerable to this sort of outside influence. Since many different odors differ only in their molecular details--and we long ago traded away nasal acuity for better color vision--our brain is often forced to decipher smells based upon non-sensory information. Parmesan cheese and vomit, for example, are both full of butyric acid, which has a pungent top note and a sweetish linger. As a result, blindfolded subjects in experiments will often confuse the two stimuli. In real life, however, such sensory mistakes are extremely rare. Common sense overrules our actual senses.
Brain & Behavior
Comments (7)
This is a pretty common phenomenon in real life, as far as i know.
Anybody who buys multipacks of flavoured/scented things, and then uses up an "undesired" flavour by telling themselves it is actually a different flavour has seen the tip of the iceberg. And of course, small children who "hate cherry" but "love grape" can easily be tricked if they are told they are eating "red grape" and not "red cherry".
(Sorry about all the quotes. They annoy me too; but here i'm trying to make a specific point about how the brain perceives artificiality.)
Posted by: yttrai | September 2, 2008 2:29 PM