Puke: Don’t Invest In The Familar
by ilene - October 31st, 2009 1:17 am
Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome. So there's a name for my aversion to seafood and anything on the same plate. And organ meats, and fake cheese. And cool whip. – Ilene
Puke: Don't Invest In The Familar
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome
If you’re unfortunate enough to eat something that violently disagrees with you, so much so that you end up vomiting, you’ll likely find yourself suffering from Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome. Otherwise known as taste aversion, it causes us to associate the taste of the food we’ve puked up with the illness that caused it to such an extent we’re unable to face eating it again.
As I can personally attest, this effect is incredibly strong even when the food in question has nothing to do with the illness. Even knowing this doesn’t help because the primacy we place on personal experience over all others is so strong. However, while this may be of great survival value when grazing forest floors it’s less helpful in investing, where personal experience is often the worst possible guide to the best strategy.
Adaptive, Involuntary and Subjective Investors
The adaptive value of Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome is pretty obvious. If you’re a hungry semi-evolved simian wandering around a primeval forest and you happen upon a tasty looking mushroom then eating it may make you extremely sick. Assuming you survive the experience it’s a darn good evolutionary trick to find a way of stopping the stupid ape from making the same mistake again – so automatically triggering an aversion to the taste is nature’s way of keeping us alive. Of course, if we ate the other sort of mushroom we'd probably spend a day dreaming of kaleidoscopic antelopes and evolve to become an investment analyst.
However, when I became sick after eating my favourite Indian curry it was nothing to do with the food, but a bug I’d picked up on a skiing trip with a host of plague ridden kids. It took a year and a lot of red wine to overcome the aversion, despite knowing exactly what the problem was. The S-B effect is involuntary and powerful and entirely subjective.
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