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In this podcast, Krista Tippett talks with the science writer and reporter Erik Vance about the brain’s theater of healing — also known as we have dismissively called “the placebo effect”.
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Vance has investigated the healing power of stories and the “theater of medicine”. It turns out that the things that make us feel better are often more closely connected to what we believe; As we are fundamentaly storytellers, our healing is based on the stories we tell ourselves. Our brain primary function is to make sense of the word.
”So, when you give someone a sugar pill, and you say, “This is gonna take away your pain,” it’s not a circus trick. This is getting down to the very fundamental role that your brain has. t’s partly because your brain has an expectation, that when you take a pill, your pain goes away. And sometimes it’s easier for your brain to change reality than it is to change an expectation.”
Vance also talk how Hypnosis is an hack for people to teach themselves to tap into their brain.
”Hypnosis is amazing! What’s interesting about hypnosis, it’s actually not placebo, because you can give people drugs to makes placebo effects go away, the hypnosis still works. We just don’t know, enough, what hypnosis is. If you haven’t tried that, find out if you’re hypnotizable. If you are, you got a whole bunch of tools to play with!”
Let’s play!