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| From: Reanimation Library |
"Antique Italian violins, such as those crafted by Antonio Stradivari or Giuseppe Guarneri 'del Gesu,' can fetch millions of dollars. Many violinists truly believe that these instruments are better than newly made violins, and several scientists have tried to work out why. Some suspected at the unusually dense wood, harvested from Alpine spruces that grew during an Ice Age. Others pointed the finger at the varnish, or the chemicals that Stradivari used to treat the wood.
But Claudia Fritz (a scientist who studies instrument acoustics) and Joseph Curtin (a violin-maker) may have discovered the real secret to a Stradivarius’s sound: nothing at all.
The duo asked professional violinists to play new violins, and old ones by Stradivari and Guarneri. They couldn’t tell the difference between the two groups. One of the new violins even emerged as the most commonly preferred instrument."
— Discover Magazine
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"An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.
A survey of hundreds of drinkers found that on average people could tell good wine from plonk no more often than if they had simply guessed."
— The Guardian
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"'Of course, the wine preferences of the subjects were clearly nonsensical. Instead of acting like rational agents — getting the most utility for the lowest possible price — they were choosing to spend more money for an identical product. When the scientists repeated the experiment with members of the Stanford University wine club, they got the same results. In a blind tasting, these 'semi-experts' were also misled by the made-up price tage. 'We don't realize how powerful our expectations are,' says Antonio Rangel, a neuroeconomist at Cal-Tech who led the study. 'They can really modulate every aspect of our experience. And if our expectations are based on false assumptions' — like the assumption that more expensive wine always taste better — 'they can be very misleading.'"
—Jonah Lehrer (from his book How We Decide), The Frontal Cortex
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