Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

The psychophysicist Mark Changizi has a simple evolutionary explanation for why water ‘doesn’t taste of anything’: he thinks that the human taste mechanism has been calibrated not to notice the taste of water, so it is optimally attuned to the taste of anything that might be polluting it. If water tasted like Dr Pepper, it would be easier for sensory overload to drown out the hint of ‘dead sheep’, which would alert us to the fact that a car-cass was decaying in a pool five hundred yards upstream. Water ‘tastes of nothing’, so we notice the smallest thing which deviates from this. You can try a similar experiment with young children. Feed them their favourite food, but add a subtle herb or spice. They will find it revolting, because the slight deviation from what they expect alarms them into believing it is somehow unsafe.