时差N小时 烛光里的电视晚餐

Imagine a friend of yours has invited you over for dinner to share a gourmet¹ meal and an expensive bottle of wine. You really enjoy the meal and the wine and ask your friend where she got the stuff. She confesses that the "gourmet meal" was really a TV dinner nicely arranged on your plate, and that the pricey wine bottle had been emptied before you came over and re-filled with cheap wine. Some dinner! But much of the enjoyment² we receive from consuming gourmet foods, pricey wines, and other fancy products comes from the perception that these 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 their price per bottle, which ranged from five to ninety dollars. While participants drank and rated the wines, their brain activity was monitored and recorded using functional³ magnetic resonance⁴ imaging, or fMRI. During this experiment the sneaky researchers gave participants the same wine twice: first labeled as coming from a ninety-dollar bottle, and then again from a ten-dollar bottle. Interestingly people consistently rated the ninety-dollar wine higher than the ten-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 a spot in the brain believed to be associated with the experience of pleasure, called the medial orbitofrontal 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 wine you're better off not asking any questions at all, because in this case ignorance is bliss⁵.

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。

1 gourmet   

n.食物品尝家；adj.出于美食家之手的

参考例句：

• What does a gourmet writer do? 美食评论家做什么？
• A gourmet like him always eats in expensive restaurants.像他这样的美食家总是到豪华的餐馆用餐。

2 enjoyment   

n.乐趣；享有；享用

参考例句：

• Your company adds to the enjoyment of our visit. 有您的陪同，我们这次访问更加愉快了。
• After each joke the old man cackled his enjoyment.每逢讲完一个笑话，这老人就呵呵笑着表示他的高兴。

3 functional   

adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的

参考例句：

• The telephone was out of order,but is functional now.电话刚才坏了，但现在可以用了。
• The furniture is not fancy,just functional.这些家具不是摆着好看的，只是为了实用。

4 resonance   

n.洪亮；共鸣；共振

参考例句：

• Playing the piano sets up resonance in those glass ornaments.一弹钢琴那些玻璃饰物就会产生共振。
• The areas under the two resonance envelopes are unequal.两个共振峰下面的面积是不相等的。

5 bliss   

n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福

参考例句：

• It's sheer bliss to be able to spend the day in bed.整天都可以躺在床上真是幸福。
• He's in bliss that he's won the Nobel Prize.他非常高兴，因为获得了诺贝尔奖金。