Ongoing History Daily: Noisy potato chips

Here is a weird story about a different kind of audio. Unless you’re popping the top on a tube of Pringles, there’s no such thing as a quiet bag of potato chips. No matter how quiet you try to be, they inevitably make a big racket. Why? To make them taste better.

Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University who wondered about the need for noisy potato chip packaging. He discovered that a noisy bag makes for a better-tasting chip. He recruited volunteers to eat chips while wearing isolating headphones. They reported that the chips tasted “stale and spongy.” The moment they removed the headphones so they could hear them, and the rustling of the bag, was the moment the chips started tasting better. 

Ain’t it interesting how the brain processes sound?