Placebo’s Double Whammy
Sham treatments can both reduce pain and increase pleasure, and do so affecting similar circuitry in the brain.
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/37876/title/Placebo-s-Double-Whammy/
I talk about placebos from time to time, this is another interesting article. If you are anticipating a pain reduction one part of your brain gets activated, if you are anticipating a pleasure enhancement another part gets activated. I wonder if we can ever effectively harness the power of the placebo, or rather, the power of our own mind to control how our mind feels. No doubt this is a core element of depression, once you get depressed your brain starts biochemical feedback that can keep you depressed or drives you to incapacitation (or to take your own life). I wonder how much of this feedback happens for successful people. I feel very strongly that had things been just slightly different for me life would be radically different (hard to say if it would be better, but easy to say it would be different). I just finished reading a book about angel investing from the investor’s point of view and I am pretty sure that it is just ‘bad’ luck (see here and here for my take on luck) that has kept me from making the right contacts that could have lead to the positive feedback situation where I would achieve the goals I had imagined. I might still be able to get ‘lucky’ (in business; I am already lucky in love) and start that feedback in my brain that makes me ‘luckier’ still, what is simple happenstance and what is ‘real’?
Maybe there is something to the blather about ‘if you believe it it will happen’…
