Our brain doesn't always know the difference between what's real and what we think is real.
Does Fake surgery prove our minds are more powerful than we thought?
We’ve all heard about the placebo effect. It’s a well established medical fact that clinical subjects who merely think they are getting a real dose of medicine can often report positive results even though they are swallowing nothing more than a sugar pill - a fake, a fugazzi.
Placebo effects are often seen in about 30-40% of drug trials - which is an astonishing fact. And for a long time, no one seemed all that impressed… including scientists.
According to the Journal Neuropsychopharmacology “placebos have long been considered a nuisance in clinical research [but] today they represent an active and productive field of research”. A great example of the brain’s superpowers is something called, Sham Surgery and its the Placebo effect’s more impressive cousin.
In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Researchers note: “the act of performing surgery itself has a profound placebo effect” This essentially means that people who are cut open but not fully operated on, still may report some of the positive effects that subjects of the real surgery experience.
In fact, this is such a well known phenomenon that real surgical procedures are often tested against fake ones to determine if they are actually effective
The take home here is that our brain doesn’t always know the difference between what’s real & what we think is real. Neuroscientists believe we only know a fraction of what the brain can do.
And as the research continues to come in, we will know more about how the brain shapes our physical reality. And the freaky powers of the mind will hopefully be rescued from the realms of the new age & the woo-woo and become firm scientific fact.
Like Spiderman’s uncle Ben said, with “great power, comes great responsibility”