Interesting show on World Service on Saturday night:
Interesting parts were, paraphrasing of course;
- That price doesn't just effect our logical judgement it actually changes the brain's reaction and increases pleasure activity in the brain therefore creating REAL emotional and subject feelings of something being better.
- Wine tasters who were more verbose about flavours and enjoyed talking about flavours and their sensory experience were much worse at wine tasting experiements (where the wine was the same all the way through, but other aspects changed) whereas quiet tatsers were more able to actually pay attention to their senses more reliably.
- Music which is different to expectation (chord changes out of the ordinary etc) create physical chills down your neck - some emotional response to music could just be animalistic instint reacting to something jumping out of the environment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqlyw
The Power of Expectation
Can our expectations affect the outcome of what we do? This week we look at the power of expectation. How good are you at blind tasting? Could you tell if you sipped three different cups of coffee which was the best quality without seeing the price? And if you were given a pill to cure a headache – do you think it would help, regardless of whether it was real medicine or not?
The Swedish neuroscientist Predrag Petrovic asks if a doctor’s expectations can affect the success of a patient’s treatment, the Indian neuro-economist Baba Shiv explains why consumers expect something to be better if they pay more, and the American musicologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on why our enjoyment of music is determined by what we’re expecting to hear.