Expensive Wines Trigger More Pleasure in the Brain

A $150 pair of jeans is much better than a $30 one or is it just an illusion? You are paying in fact for the brand, but no matter what, you'll always think that more expensive stuff is better. This has got scientific support with a new research published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What is presented to us as an expensive wine can be perceived to taste better even if it's in fact a cheap drink.

Brain nuclei connected to pleasant sensations displayed stronger excitation to wines thought to be more expensive even when tasters in fact drank the same beverage twice, but they were told they had different prices.

The team led by Antonio Rangel at the California Institute of Technology checked the idea that higher prices make people perceive things as having higher quality. Twenty subjects tasted wine while their brain activity was scanned using fMRIs. They were told the wines were five different Cabernet Sauvignons coming at different prices, while in fact there were just 3 wines, two being presented twice, at different prices: a $90 wine was presented with its real price and again at $10, while another type of wine was offered at its real $5 price and at a price of $45.

"The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine. In other words, changes in the price of the wine changed the actual pleasure experienced by the drinkers," researchers stated.

Paradoxically, when tasters were offered no information about prices, they chose the $5 wine as the best of the tasted wines (but the tasters were deliberately chosen not to be professionals).

"We were shocked. I think it was because the flavor was stronger and our subjects were not very experienced," Rangel told National Geographic News.

"Our results suggest that the brain might compute experienced pleasantness in a much more sophisticated manner that involves integrating the actual sensory properties of the substance being consumed with the expectations about how good it should be," the authors wrote.