Raise a wine's price tag, and people's brains register more pleasure

In a 2008 brain-scan study, the same wine tasted better when labelled with a higher price. A $5 wine tagged as $45 was rated more pleasant than a $90 wine tagged as $10, and brain activity in a region tied to experienced pleasure tracked the fake price, not the real one. Without any price shown at all, tasters rated the wines no differently.

— Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv & Antonio Rangel, Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008