时差N小时: 烛光里的电视晚餐

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.

设想你的一位朋友邀你前来赴宴，共享美食和一瓶昂贵的酒。你真的吃得很尽兴，这时你问起来：这些东西从哪来。她坦白说这顿“美食”其实是精心盛放在你盘子里的“电视晚餐”。那瓶昂贵的酒在你过来之前就喝光了，只不过又重新装上了便宜货。真是雷人的晚餐啊!然而我们从这些美食，名酒或者其他奢侈品上得到的欢乐大多数来源于稀有和昂贵带来的虚荣感。

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!

在加利福尼亚理工学院的一项研究中，研究人员将五瓶酒分别贴上价格标签，价格从五美元到90美元不等。然后让被试者评价这五瓶酒的品质。在被试者品酒时，监测他们的大脑活动，并用功能磁共振成像(fMRI)做纪录。在实验过程中，研究者暗中做了手脚：前后两次给了同样的酒，第一次贴上90美元的标签，然后再贴上10美元的标签。有趣的是，被试者一致认为价值90美元的酒要比10美元的品质高，事实上它们是一样的酒!

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，被试者在喝昂贵的酒时fMRI扫描显示大脑的一个部位更加活跃，这个部位可能与快乐的体验有关，这个部位被称为内侧前额皮层。

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.

看来下次你的朋友再邀请你共享美食和名酒时，你最好不要问人任何问题，因为在这种情况下，无知者才是最快乐的。