Nir Eyal

Okay.

And they washed out their mouth.

Okay, now we're going to give you the next wine.

This wine is a very expensive bottle of wine.

It's a Chateau de something.

What do you think of this one?

Oh, people would say, this is a very good wine.

I can taste the notes of blackberry and hints of oak, all the stuff that wine snobs say that I don't understand.

And as they did this, they were monitoring, again, blood flow throughout the brain.

Now, here's the amazing thing.

The wine, there's a trick, the wine was the same bottle.

And yet people not only would articulate that the more expensive wine was better, they actually felt it was better.

It changed their subjective assessment of the wine.

They weren't lying.

It actually tasted better for them because we could see that blood flow was increasing in the reward centers of the brain.

So they weren't lying.

They weren't just telling the researchers what they thought they wanted to hear.

They felt the wine was better.

They actually tasted the wine differently because of what they anticipated would happen.

So this is the second power of belief, the power of beliefs to change what we feel based on what we anticipate.