Psych-Out

What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction
For all of life is a dream
And dreams? dreams are dreams
(Calderón de la Barca)

“Food, like eroticism, starts with the eyes…” writes Isabel Allende. Before that first morsel hits our taste buds, they’re primed by what we see. (Doesn’t your mouth start to pucker when staring at the photograph above?) In turn, what we see sets up a cascade of thought, belief, and memory. Our cognition frames our sensations. We taste not only that little morsel rolling across our tongue, but everything we’ve come to expect from that first bite. As the great chef Auguste Escoffier said, “Even horsemeat can be delicious when one is in the right circumstances to appreciate it.”

Fredéréc Brochet of the University of Bordeaux took two middling Bordeaux wines and served it to over 50 wine experts in two different bottles. One bottle was labeled Grand Cru — one of the highest levels of wine classification. The other bottle was labeled as an ordinary table wine. Although the wines were the exact same, 40 of the experts rated the wine designated Grand Cru as highly favorable, calling it “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded.” The other? “Weak, short, flat, faulty.” Only 12 of the experts said the wine designated as an ordinary table wine was worth drinking at all.

Studies of this kind are numerous. A little sprig of parsley added to a food company’s logo (Hormel Foods), the shape of a bottle (Christian Brothers Brandy), adding yellow die to change a margarine from white to yellow and adding a crown to it’s logo (Imperial Margarine), have all been shown to have powerful effects on how those tastes hit our taste buds. When Seven-up added 15% yellow to the green on its can (without changing the flavor a drop), there was a public uproar that the company added more lemon to their favorite drink!

In a recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association subjects were told they would be testing out a brand new pain killer. They were first given a small electric shock, and then given a placebo pill that they were told would ease the discomfort. Half were told the little sugar pill cost $2.50 a pill, the other half that the same pill cost 10¢. 85% of the $2.50 group said the pill reduced the pain, while only 61% of the 10¢ group said so. (Of course, the fact that so many found relief in the first place is startling in and of itself!) In essence, not only do we come to value more those things we perceive to be more expensive, we actually experience them as better.

Our entire library of memories, beliefs, expectations, and desires guide how and what our senses pick up from the world. Is it that our senses are fooled, or are they actually shaped by what our experience brings? To most, a seared steak seems juicier and more flavorful, even though the searing actually dries out the meat. What we in fact are experiencing is the saliva from our own mouths triggered in expectation of that juicy piece of meat hitting our tongues!

Our brain has been wired by the forces of natural selection to believe and trust its own impressions, often even in spite of information to the contrary. Biases feel like facts, expectations are indistinguishable from sensations. For better and for worse, we are wired to experience what we expect, and then believe it without question. The philosopher Donald Davidson wrote, “Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing about which to be subjective.”

In the simpler, yet more dangerous, black and white world of our evolutionary ancestors, the strategy of “trust your senses” worked good enough to get us through. The shadow side is that what we sense, and often act upon, far too easily fall prey to illusions set in play, and often outside of our conscious awareness, by our very own hopes, fears, wants, and expectations. (Watch subliminal advertisement demonstration by mentalist and magician Derren Brown below!)

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Suggested readings

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Allende, Isabel. Aphrodite: a Memoir of the Senses. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. (A beautiful book on food and eroticism, with great recipes to enliven the senses!)

Gladwell, Malcom. Blink. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2005.

Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Miffin, 2007 (Section on August Escoffier).