Expectation, Perception and Hot Sauce

A study uses hot sauce, of all things, to show how what we expect influences what we perceive.

Our perceptions of reality are already fragile things. We perceive the world through our eyes, ears, sensory nerves in our skin, proprioceptive receptors, and integrate all that information into our brains to create a model of reality that allows us, at least, to navigate through it. But these systems are fallible — as simple illusions illustrate, prone to error, and dependent on prior experience which may color our perceptions for the rest of our lives.

And as if that isn’t bad enough — what we perceive as reality is shaped by our very expectations.

If you give a patient a pill, even a sugar pill, and they expect that it will help them, it will help them. If you tell them the pill you gave them often causes nausea, they will become nauseated.

But what fascinates me about this phenomenon is that that it’s not just confirmation bias. People aren’t faking the benefit, or faking the nausea. There are real, measurable changes happening in the brain when expectation and reality meet.

And this week, we are exploring that meeting…. With hot sauce.