How Does the Placebo Effect Work in the Brain?

Placebos are used a lot – they’re used as the “control” in drug testing and elsewhere. Technically, nothing in a placebo should have any effect on the person receiving the placebo but that’s not the case in real life.

Partly because we’ve been trained that placebos work from a very early age – if your mother ever kissed you better, that was a placebo (unless your mother has supernatural powers that we’re not aware of). In sports, you might have had pain eased by the “magic sponge” which was just a sponge soaked in cold water.

And those are just two common examples of how you’ve probably had a placebo used on you, or someone close to you, and it worked.

So it’s no real surprise that our brain thinks placebos work, even when it should know better.

Of course, if the placebo is used in a medical trial, it’s a bit more complicated.

The pill or potion is crafted to look like the real thing. It comes complete with the same packaging and same instructions as the real thing. And, quite often, neither neither the participants or the people administering the drug know whether it’s the real thing or a placebo. This is to prevent undue bias working its way into the trial.

It doesn’t have to be a clinical trial either. Placebos work elsewhere.

Derren Brown has given people “subliminal” CDs to play with no subliminal messages on them and they’ve reported positive results in line with having the real thing played to them. Whether this proves the power of Derren (he’s a master of suggestion amongst other things) or whether it proves that subliminals work or don’t work, I’m not totally sure. I think I’m more inclined to go with subliminals working but if you want to use yourself as a guinea pig you can get hold of a couple of free tracks here to test the water.

Derren Brown also experimented with some pills called Rumyodin. He decided that capsules were the better format as they work better in real life (go figure) and they were also administered in a clinical setting by people posing as doctors and nurses. That’s the same as when a pain killer is advertised and an actor wears an official “doctor” white coat and drapes a stethoscope round their neck. We believe it more.

Interestingly, with things like pain killers, people report faster pain relief from capsules than tablets. They also report better results if they’ve paid more for a brand than a generic tablet even though the dose is identical.

So if you’ve done that and Nurofen works better than unbranded Ibuprofen for you, your brain has given you the placebo effect without you noticing.

How does the placebo effect work in our brain?

Our brain is trained to take short cuts.

If we had to re-learn how to walk over a slightly uneven surface or when we encountered a kerb, we’d take forever. Likewise if every time we saw a different type of chair we had to go through the process of working out how to sit in it.

The same happens almost everywhere in our lives.

For some things, it’s called habit. For other things, it’s just how we do them.

Placebos work exactly the same way.

If you had to work out how to take each different type of pain killer, then each vitamin pill and any medicines your doctor gave you or you bought from the pharmacist, life wouldn’t be fun.

You see a pill in a packet, you glance at the label to check the dosage, you swallow the pill and wash it down with some water. Job done.

You then let the pill do whatever it was designed to do. If it’s fast action, you’ll get the desired result quicker than if it’s not. If it’s supposed to work for about 4 hours before needing the next dose, you’ll start to notice when the time is getting closer.

Whether or not whatever it was you took has addressed the problem you were experiencing.

That’s the placebo effect in full swing. It enhances the power of “real” products and often works just as well when it’s a placebo. Even giving some people the side effects only associated with the real thing, weird as that may sound.

Then there’s homeopathic products.

These are as close to being a placebo as you’re likely to have bought.

Most homeopathic liquids have literally the equivalent of about one drop in an ocean of the supposedly active ingredient. So as close to zero as the company is likely to get without being admonished for false advertising.

And you usually only take a few drops of a homeopathic liquid or one small sugar pill per dose. In this instance, it really is a sugar pill and you’re told that it is but that it’s been infused with whatever remedy it’s supposed to contain. Maybe you’re even warned not to touch the pill with your hands as that will cancel the effect.

Which means that, in theory, a homeopathic medicine is no different from a placebo.

But because it’s surrounded by mystique, professional labelling (or maybe amateur if that gives the idea it’s been hand created) and probably prescribed by an authority figure who you’ve paid money to, it works.

That last part is another important part of the equation.

It comes back to the brand named products performing better than their identical generic competitors.

We’ve been trained from a very early age that paying more for things gets a better product or a better result.

So a brand named t-shirt made in the same far-flung foreign factory for the same price as a dollar store t-shirt is much better quality. Obviously. So we pay more for it and take better care of it (because it was more expensive) so it lasts longer and wears better.

Another placebo.

It’s just how our minds are trained.

But it also means we can use the placebo effect to improve our lives.

Because so long as we can convince our minds something is true (and we’re easily convinced if we want to believe something) then we can play nice tricks on our minds to get the results we want.

If you’d like to discover more about how to do this, you can get a free report on the placebo effect here. It’s a short read but your mind will be buzzing about the possibilities in the few minutes it takes. So download it, read it and maybe test out some of the ideas in it for yourself.