New measures of tastiness

A new study of "expert" wine tasters revealed that the tasters rated bottles of wine they were told were more expensive as "better" than bottles that were reportedly cheap. In their defense, though, the study also looked at a neurological component of the tasting:

Since reported tastiness is a poor measure of true taste experience in the era of fMRI scanning machines, the researchers were careful enough to take a peek into their participant's brains as these tasted the wines, and found something fairly surprising: When tasting the wine out of the $10 bottle, the medial orbitofrontal cortex - an area of the brain that is strongly related to experiences of pleasure - showed only very little activity. When the exact same wine was poured out of a $90 bottle however, this brain area showed levels of activation which indicate that the participants were indeed drawing much more enjoyment from the same wine this time around. In other words, the price tag seemed to have a real physiological influence on the taster's taste experience.

"Distinguished" palettes everywhere are screaming.