Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class. Okay, true story. A few years ago, I was staying at a hotel in Norway, in a fishing town, and I came down to breakfast the first morning to find a large buffet, the sort where you help yourself to just about anything. Well, I decided to go for some pancakes that looked really good. So I stacked several on my plate, found a table and dug in, took one big bite, and yuck. It was horrible. Turns out, it wasn\'t pancakes after all. It was fish cakes. Now don\'t get me wrong, normally, I quite like fish. But after that experience, I couldn\'t eat fish again for a month. So why did I react so badly to it? Probably because I had a specific expectation of what I was about to taste. And since what I put in my mouth didn\'t meet my expectations, I judged it as tasting bad. Now this idea that expectations can influence our experiences has been examined by psychologists in numerous experiments. In one, researchers gave away three cups of coffee to university students in a school cafeteria. After pouring the coffee, they directed the students to a table set with cream and sugar, the usual coffee additives, as well as some more unusual condiments, spices like cloves and cardamom, which aren\'t commonly added to coffee in this part of the world. What the researchers varied was how these unusual condiments, the cloves and cardamom, were displayed. Sometimes they were displayed in fine glass containers on a brushed metal tray with silver spoons. Other times they were placed in inexpensive Styrofoam cups. Finally, after the students tasted the coffee, the researchers asked them their opinion of it, and the results suggested that the way those unusual condiments were displayed seems to have affected opinions about the coffee, even though no one actually added them to their coffee. When the condiments were served in fancy containers, the students were much more likely to say they liked the coffee and would be willing to pay a high price for it. So one interpretation of what\'s going on here is that the condiment display affected the student\'s expectations about the quality of the coffee being offered. And their expectations, in turn, affected their actual opinion of the coffee, which is pretty interesting. But some psychologists raised an even more interesting possibility, that the reason our expectations influence our opinions is because our expectations change our physiological responses, the neurological activity that produces the experience for us. To investigate this, some neuroscientists conducted a taste test with two brands of soda. Let\'s just…… so I don\'t affect your expectations, let\'s just call them brand A and brand B. Okay, with brand A being the more popular. Now, the two sodas are very similar in taste, so the reason brand A sells better than brand B may have more to do with marketing than actual taste. Anyway, the experiment was designed to find out whether people\'s knowledge of which soda they were tasting actually changed the way it tasted to them. So as the participants tasted the soda, the neurological activity that went on in their brains was measured using a machine called an fMRI. That\'s a a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. Now it\'s not so easy for people to drink something when they\'re lying down in an fMRI. So they had to drink the soda through a long tube. The researchers sometimes let them know which brand of soda they were getting, and sometimes they didn\'t. So what happened? Well, when participants did not know which soda they were tasting, the portion of the brain associated with strong emotions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was activated when they tasted a soda. The strength of the activation was the same no matter which brand of soda they were given. But when they were told which brand they were getting by being shown its logo, an additional part of the prefrontal cortex was also activated, the part involved in making associations and with higher order thinking. And the response there was stronger when they were given brand A. So when people knew they were tasting the more popular brand, more neurons in more parts of their brain were activated, suggesting that knowing which soda they were receiving may indeed have affected their perception of the way the soda tasted.