Nir Eyal

Uh, you know, it's a little harsh on the finish.

I don't know.

It's okay.

Okay, great.

Now we're going to give you an expensive bottle of wine.

You ready for it?

Okay.

And they're sitting in the fMRI machine.

They get this little tube that squirts an expensive sample of wine in their mouth.

And now they report, oh, tell us what you think of this wine.

Oh, this wine is very complex.

It has hints of oak and cherry and all the things that wine snobs say.

Of course, the trick here is, you know there's a trick, there's always a trick, it's the same wine.

The only thing that was different was that they told them one was cheap and one was expensive.

Now, not only did people report

that the expensive wine tastes better, right, that's not that surprising, their brains actually experience the wine differently.

So we could see areas of their brain activate differently, showing us that they actually did perceive the more expensive wine as tastier.

They weren't lying, they weren't making it up.

They actually were experiencing it differently.

And this is where people really misunderstand the point of advertising.