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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.