BENNINGTON, VT – A recent study by the California Institute of Technology showed that changes in the stated price of a sampled wine influenced how good volunteers thought the wine tasted. The study also showed that volunteers' brains reacted differently when the price of the sampled wine rose. Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at the university, said, "Prices, by themselves, affect activity in an area of the brain that is thought to encode the experienced pleasantness of an experience."

The study involved 20 volunteers, each of whom tasted five wine samples. The samples were given different retail prices ranging from $5 to $90 per bottle. While the volunteers tasted and evaluated the wines, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The study found that volunteers consistently reported liking the taste of the $90 bottle better than the $5 bottle, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 bottle. In addition, scans of their brains found that the area responsible for pleasure (the medial orbitofrontal cortex) showed higher activity when the volunteers drank the higher-priced wines. The study does not, however, reveal whether the subjects truly experienced more pleasure from the wines they thought were more expensive, only that they thought they did.

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