Hacking your brain: the imaginary world of placebos

Belief is a powerful drug. It is a drug that works best at the deepest levels of the human mind, affecting it both consciously and unconsciously. Belief, how a drug works, when human beings perceive that it comes from something authentic. The critical word here is ‘perceive’, since for humans perception is reality. Frankly, perception is all that really matters.

It doesn’t really matter what the facts are, but beliefs in the potency of a strange tasting energy drink, military flags and uniforms, homeopathy, a swoosh symbol, or some exotic potion of feminine beauty have led to the creation of large companies, institutions. and brands. These symbols or ideas or brands trigger a significant positive change in your consumers or followers.

Placebos, in the medical field, have helped relieve chronic pain, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, angina, asthma, ulcers, Parkinson’s disease, and even cancer. It can be a pill or an injection.

Placebos are great problem-solving tools. They are ideas that are planted in our minds. In a sense, they hack into our brains. And beliefs create expectations. “Expectations create a different reality for us that we don’t really appreciate,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist. The good thing about placebos is that they are very effective. And they do it without incurring side effects. Since they are primarily ideas, they cost very little physical resources to manufacture or manufacture. And yet they provide a lot of value to their recipients.

Like all things that don’t seem logical at first, we underestimate the power of the placebo effect. A placebo, if administered properly, is a great problem solver and a kind of force amplifier in the hands of a large number of professionals: doctors, pharmaceutical companies, product innovators, leaders, marketing professionals, advertising professionals and professionals. creatives, organizational development people, etc.

There are amazing examples of placebos in medical science that show that certain surgeries or procedures are nothing more than a placebo. A meta-study of several studies involving thousands of patients has concluded that coronary heart stents have a placebo effect. The option of having patients take medications instead of having a stent installed is as effective as the procedure of installing a stent. So far the uproar over exorbitant stent prices and the need to regulate them in countries like India.

Similarly, a study of knee surgery was performed for joint pain (actual partial meniscectomy where the knee was actually cut off). One group of respondents received real surgery and the other group received sham or fake knee surgery (imitation of a real one with real tools). Over the 12-month follow-up, both groups experienced equal and significant improvements.

Humans have had a difficult journey, like an average animal, to survive. In general, as a species we have been resistant, having survived and survived a large number of competing species. This hard journey has been aided by an amazing skill that we have developed in the course of our evolution. It is the ability to heal ourselves literally and metaphorically.

Placebos raise our expectations. Placebos work by persuading the body to invest more resources in recovery. People consciously believe that the sugar pill as a placebo will make a headache go away, and lo and behold, it often does.

Our evolution has genetically prepared us not to trigger our own self-healing. We are looking for an external agent or placebo to trigger our self-healing both on a psychological and physiological level, that an effective placebo must involve some effort or cost in obtaining it. An effective placebo cannot be something common or gratuitous, a random sugar pill.

In the following articles we will see some of the characteristics of the placebo effect, how it plays out in our lives and in our business. It is an amazing effect, underused and little exploited by medicine, marketing, business and the arts. In fact, it seems that companies and brands use the placebo effect, much more than medicine.