Montaigne in Of smells alludes to how great cooks use smells to effect our taste. The smell makes us believe the taste is different than it is. (Montaigne's point may be slightly different.) The smell doesn't simply effect our taste, but as the sense of taste is a separate sense from smell, we can say it in facts cheats the sense of taste. It doesn't only effect our overall experience but because of our confusion and lack of precision, we actually sense the food has a different taste than it actually does.

I just drove a friend's Camaro and noticed something funny. While the Camaro is a very nice car, in its base configuration it is underpowered compared to other more powerful configurations. What do they do? They add noise. From the noise of the car when you speed up, you would think it has great acceleration. The noise attempts to act as a placebo effect to convince us that it has greater acceleration than it actually does. This may work because we already have a pavlovian response to noise as equaling acceleration in sport cars. I'm not describing the precise sound precisely enough, nor am I sure it is correct about the Camaro, but it made me think of this topic.

I was wondering what are other cases where people or companies use placebos, our belief of getting something real while it is only make-believe (often through presenting us with the side effect without the supposed origin of them).