時差N小時: 燭光里的電視晚餐

Imagine a friend of yours has invited you over fordinner to share a gourmet meal and an expensivebottle of wine. You really enjoy the meal and thewine and ask your friend where she got the stuff.She confesses that the "gourmet meal" was really aTV dinner nicely arranged on your plate, and that thepricey wine bottle had been emptied before youcame over and re-filled with cheap wine. Somedinner! But much of the enjoyment we receive fromconsuming gourmet foods, pricey wines, and otherfancy products comes from the perception thatthese products are rare and expensive.

設想你的一位朋友邀你前來赴宴，共享美食和一瓶昂貴的酒。你真的吃得很盡興，這時你問起來：這些東西從哪來。她坦白說這頓“美食”其實是精心盛放在你盤子里的“電視晚餐”。那瓶昂貴的酒在你過來之前就喝光了，只不過又重新裝上了便宜貨。真是雷人的晚餐啊!然而我們從這些美食，名酒或者其他奢侈品上得到的歡樂大多數(shù)來源于稀有和昂貴帶來的虛榮感。

A study out of Caltech had participants rate the quality of five wines each labeled only by theirprice per bottle, which ranged from five to ninety dollars. While participants drank and ratedthe wines, their brain activity was monitored and recorded using functional magneticresonance imaging, or fMRI. During this experiment the sneaky researchers gave participantsthe same wine twice: first labeled as coming from a ninety-dollar bottle, and then again from aten-dollar bottle. Interestingly people consistently rated the ninety-dollar wine higher than theten-dollar, even though they were really the same wine!

在加利福尼亞理工學院的一項研究中，研究人員將五瓶酒分別貼上價格標簽，價格從五美元到90美元不等。然后讓被試者評價這五瓶酒的品質(zhì)。在被試者品酒時，監(jiān)測他們的大腦活動，并用功能磁共振成像(fMRI)做紀錄。在實驗過程中，研究者暗中做了手腳：前后兩次給了同樣的酒，第一次貼上90美元的標簽，然后再貼上10美元的標簽。有趣的是，被試者一致認為價值90美元的酒要比10美元的品質(zhì)高，事實上它們是一樣的酒!

Moreover when drinking the supposedly pricey wine the fMRI scans recorded more activity in aspot in the brain believed to be associated with the experience of pleasure, called the medialorbitofrontal cortex, than when participants drank the supposedly cheap stuff.

而且相比喝便宜的酒，被試者在喝昂貴的酒時fMRI掃描顯示大腦的一個部位更加活躍，這個部位可能與快樂的體驗有關，這個部位被稱為內(nèi)側(cè)前額皮層。

So it looks like the next time your friend invites you over for a nice dinner and a bottle of wineyou're better off not asking any questions at all, because in this case ignorance is bliss.

看來下次你的朋友再邀請你共享美食和名酒時，你最好不要問人任何問題，因為在這種情況下，無知者才是最快樂的。