The Jordan Harbinger Show - 461: Erik Vance | The Curious Science of the Suggestible You

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Erik Vance (@erikvance) is an award-winning science journalist and author of Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. What We Discuss with Erik Vance: How the human tendency for patternicity can be used to inoculate ourselves against pain, but also make us believe we've been abducted by space aliens. The placebo effect vs. the nocebo effect. The power of false memories and the "Satanic Panic" phenomenon of the 1980s. How our brains twist reality to match expectations, and how it fits into our evolutionary model for survival. Why Erik paid a Mexico City witch doctor to curse him -- for science! And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/461 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. My favorite one when they do experiments on this is they implant memories by just repeating it over and over again to people about the time they went to Disneyland and met Bugs Bunny. Took a picture with Bugs Bunny. Remember he was like, put his arm around you and Bugs? And Bugs Bunny, oh, it's great. It was Mickey and Bugs and they all hang out. And of course, what's wrong with that? He's Warner Brothers. So it would be illegal for him to be at Disney World. No, you can't uncover a memory of bugs at Disney World. That didn't happen. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of some of the world's most fascinating people.

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we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help someone else get started with the show. We always appreciate that. Today it's some brain science. Animals create patterns out of nothing because it's helpful for survival.

We've talked about this on the show before that the caveman who heard a bush rustle and assumed it was a lion lived to reproduce and the person who said, oh, it's nothing, never kind of made it out to evolve to humanity today. We don't use memories or perfect recall. We use what's called patternicity. We create patterns sometimes out of nothing, which is why we believe some stupid things as well.

Our brains are actually so suggestible that we can inoculate ourselves against pain, hypnotize ourselves, even implant fake memories, like being abducted by aliens and other craziness. Now, there are some other areas where our brains are suggestible. For example, there's studies that show that athletes perform better when they drink Gatorade, even if it's just fake Gatorade, because they think it's going to help them. We've done blind taste tests with Pepsi versus Coke and Fine Wine versus Two Buck Chuck, and we can convince ourselves that one thing tastes better because we are told that it does. There's also placebo effect that dulls pain.

There's the nocebo effect, where if you don't do something, it's bad luck. And if you need an example, look no further than baseball, where you have to scuff the plates and kick the mud off with your bed, or you're going to strike out. Today we dive into all this and more. And if you're interested in some of the Easter eggs inside of our own brains, I think you'll really dig this episode. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week here on the show, it's because of my network.

And I want to help you create a network for yourself, whether it's for personal or business reasons. I'm doing it for free. That's my gift to you. That sounds horrible, but it's really true. You don't have to enter your credit card or anything like that. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and pick it up. It just takes a few minutes a day.

most of the guests you hear on the show, they subscribe to the course in the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. Here we go with Eric Vance. I know you grew up a Christian scientist, and a lot of people don't know what that is. My family actually had some of those folks on my mom's side, like years and years and years ago, and they were kind of interesting because one particular story, we were all at a restaurant, and she picked up a fork. There's my mom's aunt, the Christian scientist, and it had, like, food still stuck to it, you know, like it was pretty gross. and everyone looked at her like, what's going to happen?

Is she just going to use this fork because she doesn't believe, you know, in germs or whatever? And I don't think that's exactly what it was, but we kind of assumed that she just didn't believe in germs, which isn't really correct, right? Yeah, I mean, it's actually a really interesting way to grow up. And I'm going to totally butcher the beliefs of Christian science here, just so the layman can understand it. Sure. But I always kind of think of it as like the matrix, right? Christian scientists fundamentally believe that matter isn't really real. It doesn't really exist.

And that there's sort of a higher level beyond that. Like in the matrix where you had this sort of, you know, this code that was the higher level. It's kind of like that. In fact, I saw that when I was going to Christian Science College and people really liked it. It's not a new idea. Like this goes way back to the Gnostics and, you know, even before that in Eastern religions, you know, this idea that the physical world isn't real and that it's a mental construct is very old. But it's kind of that with a Christian spin.

And so if you think about it, if this world is all sort of mental construct, fixing things in this physical world is kind of pointless. You really have to fix it in the mind. And so it's not that you're not allowed to go to doctors. It's that why would you if none of this is real? You have to fix the mind and then the body has no choice but to follow. Which is really cool for, you know, people are aged to think about. It's a little weird when you're five and someone's explaining this to you.

And you're like, oh, okay, so none of this is real? Like, what? That is weird, but I also understand it because if you think about our position as people, look, you're a scientist, right? So, and I'm interested in science. If we look at somebody who says, yeah, I'm aligning all your chakras and I'm fixing you spiritually and we're going, yo, that's not real. Why are you focused on that? Get a real job, man. You know, we're thinking that.

That's what Christian scientists might be thinking about an actual doctor. Come on. And what are you worried about that for? This is all just pretend. You've got to be focusing on, I don't know, Christianity. dead. Yeah, why are you, you know, trying to fix this with a saw? I mean, when you think about it, it is kind of crazy. You can see why someone might look at modern medicine, be like, this is insane. Like, really? This is what you're doing. And it is very comforting. But as I got

older, I kind of had, I had lots of questions. I started experimenting with drugs, you know, like Bayer and aspirin. Yeah, aspirin. Yeah, that's usually what leads to these massive breakthroughs psychologically, right? It was a big deal, though. Like, you know, and I'm like taking like aspirin and I was like, oh, I'm like breaking the law. Like it's, you know, it was this time of sort of, wow, this stuff really works. And so I left the religion. You really have to be committed to be in that religion.

I mean, you got to be all in. Oh, you really meant drugs like Tylenol. Yeah. Oh, oh, I thought you were just being funny. I thought you meant you like did like a crazy acid trip and you were like, wait a minute. The physical world is definitely real. No, no. I like experimented with aspirin because it was like, oh, maybe, you know, I don't have

to heal my own headache. I can just take a pill. Yeah. Which was a big deal for me, you know? Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, obviously, I'm a scientist, I'm a biologist. I get very interested in the human body and, you know, took some courses and, you know, EMT type courses. And I left the religion, but I was always curious about, like, how it had worked. You know, I knew that it worked to some

extent because I had experienced it. And so there was always just like lingering, like, question in the back of my mind about, like, what was happening all those years when I was praying a whale my pain? So how did that inform your study of the brain? Because it sounds to many laymen, that, okay, if you're trying to prey away your pain, this is just delusional, you're convincing yourself, you're causing a almost mental illness in yourself, this isn't real. But it's not really that, right? This sort of kicked you off on the path to studying what's actually going on in the brain. Yeah, and I would love to take, you know, this credit for like making that breakthrough, but actually it happened at a conference I was at. It was on brain mapping. It was a brain mapping.

It was a brain mapping conference. And I was a journalist, the young science journalist, and I was looking for interesting stories. And I actually saw a name there, Tor Wager, and I recognized it as someone who had gone to my, this college I went to, this Christian Science College. And I was like, I mean, how many Tor Wagers are there in the world? Yeah, I don't know. It sounds like a Viking name, honestly.

Right? Oh, yeah. It sticks in the head. And I looked at this, he was giving a keynote speech, and it was about the placebo effect. And it just, like, a light went off my head. It was like a Catholic looking at a conference about the neuroscience of guilt. You know, I mean, it was just like, oh, wow, that former Christian scientist is talking about

placebos. So I sat in on that and that, it was really looking at other people's work that led me down this path. And it is, I think I have a unique perspective, but, you know, this was not me wondering about this. This was me plugging into a community that was just sort of forming of people who were interested in placebos and really saw that placebos were an entry into a much wider world about sort of the mind, quote, mind-body interface. And that's what led me down. And the key to this,

this sort of cornerstone of this seems to be the idea of expectation, right? What expectation means, what it does to our brain. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is? How our brains twist reality to match what we consider to be our expectations? So, I mean, I think the easiest way to describe this is, if you were to boil it down, the brain has one job. There's basically one thing that the brain does. And that is predict. It's a prediction machine. And we know when people are trying to create artificial intelligence, like that's the model they work from, going back, you know, 50, 60 years, philosophers talk about like, that's what the brain does. So a prediction is basically taking the past, applying it to the present to predict the future. Anything you're doing,

anything your brain is doing, it's like, that's basically it. So it's a fundamental part of the brain, like the fundamental part of the brain. And what it's doing is constantly, I mean, you know, just walking is an exercise and prediction, right? You are assuming that the ground is going to stay hard and you'll be able to walk on it. You're taking all these assumptions. So your brain has this vast store of assumptions and history and experience that it uses to basically navigate the world. Can you imagine living in the world without any expectations, like being a baby? Like, nothing would make sense. Everything would be crazy. A dragon could appear as in the book, you know, with the head of Harvey Kytel and you'd be like, okay, like whatever.

You need some sort of experience to tell you what reality is. So what happens is those are expectations, and they form the bedrock of how we operate. And what a placebo does, and what arguably a lot of alternative medicine does is it takes those expectations and it flips them on their head. So it makes something you expect to come true, not come true. And the brain is basically, it's like a bureaucrat. It's like some sort of like, you know, stamping bureaucrat. it doesn't want to make its job any harder than it has to, right? It's like, what's the minimum I can do?

And sometimes it's easier to change reality than it is to change an expectation. So if you take a pill and your brain really thinks that's a painkiller, and it's like, okay, every time I take a white pill, I feel better. Your brain does not feel better. And it's like, okay, well, either I can change my whole expectation about what pills are, or I can just drop some endogenous opioids that I have in my brain and make the pain go away. And then I don't have to change the expectation.

You see how that works? Yeah, that's amazing. So essentially, our brain decides that this pill is just going to be what it always expects it to be, even though reality conflicts with it, the brain's like, hold on, my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. I'm just going to pretend this is Tylenol. Yes. That's what I'm going to do right now.

We're all going to play a game where this is just Tylenol, and I don't have to do any extra work. Right. And it goes one more step more than that. It actually releases drugs to mimic the Tylenol. So it gives you that experience. because we have all these drugs on hand in our brain. I mean, the only reason that opioids work is because they mimic a chemical that's already in our brain.

A lot of drugs we take mimicking work because they mimic chemicals in our brain. And some of them better or worse than the chemicals that are actually there. But your brain has the ability to release these things. So in addition to saying, look, I don't want to work any harder for me than I have to, your brain then goes, okay, let's just drop out some opioids. We'll feel better. Reality continues to go on as I expected to. Of course, if you did this every day, eventually your brain would start thinking, like, okay, maybe

little white pills don't do what I thought they did, and then expectations do change. And you can sort of change your brain's fundamental map of the world, but, you know, not all at once. And that's actually where there's really interesting questions about, like, how those change and why, and whether or not these placebos can just continue on. And that's kind of stuff we don't know yet. That's interesting. Okay, so we have this like expectation pharmacy that's at our disposal that our brain is, doing, obviously this is all subconscious. This is not something where this isn't something that I can necessarily decide to make work for me right away, right? That's a great point. So first of all, I should say that there are many placebo effects. They're actually, and so like one of them is just a

regression to the mean, which is I take a drug when I'm feeling the worst and when you're feeling the worst what comes after, less worse. Those aren't as interesting as like this one I'm talking about. This is chemical placebo. So there are lots of different kinds of placebo effects and they all kind of have the same thing, which is, I feel better. But one way to break them down, especially the most interesting ones, is conscious and unconscious. So an unconscious placebo would be like taking that pill that you've taken your whole life, and your brain just does what it's going to do. And sometimes you can even give people a placebo pill, say, this is a placebo pill. This does not have anything in it, but it has been shown to help people. And then ask them,

what is this? And they say, okay, it's a placebo pill. Everyone gets it. You take it, and it still works. That doesn't happen for lots of people, but there is a pretty consistent group of people who still feel better. That's an unconscious placebo. Your brain just isn't going to change the way it sees the little white pill. Then there's a conscious placebo.

This is where you start getting into storytelling. And this is where you start seeing, like, someone spin just a wonderful tale about cosmic rays and chakras and ancient mysticism and space age technology. And you get

cut up in it and then you take this therapy or do whatever this magical thing is that you're trying and you feel better because your brain is sort of been won over on a conscious level like wow you know your body has all this energy and you can focus that energy and those that's a different kind of placebo effect and it looks like it happens in slightly different ways in the brain there's actually two different sort of pathways that those two placebo seem to follow so you have a choice some place you can kind of control and some you absolutely can't and so when people always say like look, I'm not gullible, but like echinacea really works. It's like, okay, first of all, yes, you are gullible. So am I. So is that guy. We all are. Like, none of us are somehow

seeing the field for what it really is. And second of all, no, you know, it doesn't really do anything. Right. But that story resonates. And sometimes they can interact. Like sometimes you hear the story, you start taking the thing, it keeps working, and then you get that unconscious placebo going. There's a lot going on there. We still haven't really pulled it all apart as in the field of science. Is this why some people think that expensive mumbo jumbo is more effective than less expensive mumbo jumbo because I'm invested. Like, no, my tarot card reader's awesome. But she's like $500 an hour.

Your $50 one may be less accurate because mine is more. And meanwhile, it's just me turning that placebo, whatever, up to 11 in my head. 100%. That's a really great point. And they've shown this again and again in laboratory experiments where if you pay more for a placebo, it works better. It's really cool because you can make placebos work better by making them expensive. It's also really evil because people can then take it to the next level,

charge thousands of dollars. And I have talked to people who spent their life savings chasing cures that were never going to happen. If you are Angelina Jolie or some movie star, you can afford to spend thousands, thousands of dollars for a placebo. But other people then see that same thing and they can't. There are some places where this gets really rough and pretty bad. But yeah, the fact is the brain responds well to higher prices, and the same can be said of

food enjoyment, like wines. And this has been shown again and again that when you price wines higher, people like them more. And it's not that they're necessarily lying to themselves about their taste experience. They very likely are having a different taste experience. You know, so much of the taste experience is from your brain's interpretation of it. And your brain has a lot of leeway in what it can make taste better to you. it may not be that you think it tastes better, it might actually taste better. Have you seen that documentary Sour Grapes where the guy turns out to just be dumping random crappy wines into bottles in his kitchen,

and he's sharing these bottles of wine. He's like, yeah, this is a $4,000 bottle of like something, something, whatever from Germany, 1944. And all these like kind of debagged Hollywood guys who pay $20,000 for bottles of scotch and wine are like, oh, it's unbelievable, impeccable. So I thought, look at these guys. And guys lie to themselves, but what you're saying is no, the brain is just decided that this is better because they've programmed it to say that. I mean, your brain has a lot of, like, dopamine and even the way you experience, and this has not been studied. We know about dopamine, but like looking at the way that different chemicals are experienced, you know, on the tongue, going through, you know, how your brain processes them, you know, and how expectation affects that, you know, on a really mechanical level.

I don't think we really understand, but it is, we know enough to say there's a good chance that that person actually is getting what they pay for. Like by paying more, it actually tastes better because their brain is experiencing it differently, you know, and I think when you see this kind of thing, like there's a, there's always this cutoff, like you can't give someone vinegar and be like, oh my God, it's great wine. Like it needs to be close. Your brain can make up the extra. And it's fun to think these people as being idiots and having terrible wine, but in fact, they might be having wonderful wine that if you tasted would not be wonderful because your brain's not doing the same thing. So this is when the Somali is something like, oh, there's tobacco and cherry and hints of chocolate. And we go, I do taste that. And it's

like, well, do you? I mean, at first I thought you don't and you're just telling yourself you do, but it sounds like what you're saying is, no, your brain is just going to go, okay, I can do chocolate, I can do cherry, I can do hints of tobacco. I've got all that in my repertoire. I can make this guy tasted if that's what he wants to do right now. Okay, yes and no. I should say one of my first stories for the journal Nature that I did many years ago, I actually went and talked to an analytical chemist who studied, can I swear on your show? Absolutely. He studied pig shit.

I think he called them like fermentation matrices, you know, organic fermentation matrices or something like that, but it was pig shit. And why they smell bad, specifically. And he had this amazing, it was called a multi-dimensional gas chromatography mass spec olfactometer. Wow, that's a lot of words for a shit meter. Yes, it is a lot of words for a shit meter. And I mean, I got one of my, obviously in my garage right now.

Sure. Who doesn't? But this thing basically would take out chemicals. a complex chemical, chop it up into pieces, and then give you each piece one at a time, both through a mass spec, which gives you a readout and up your nose. Right. And so you're basically getting the pieces of things. You would do, like, wine, and then you would also do pig shit.

And what's amazing about wine is when you break it up into pieces, all those flavors actually are there. And you can smell them. Really? Yeah, one at a time. You're like, oh, my God, he had one that was like taco shell. And that's, like, just a smell that is in a lot of different things. And you recognize him, you're like, oh, yeah. Wet cardboard's in there.

There's a bunch of different things, like, a lot of floury. stuff and they're actually all in there. And then obviously pig shit has its own little group of chemicals, not as pleasant. Okay. So it's not that there's taco shell and tobacco and cherry in the wine. It's just that those flavors, it might be like a color, like red, is in something. And it doesn't matter if the red is in blood or if the red is in the sky. Right. It's just a chemical makeup. Well, a color is not. It's light. But like this is a chemical makeup. So we know it is cherry, but it occurs everywhere in nature, and it's not necessarily just cherry. It's just that cherries maybe have more of that chemical. So you can have wine or pig crap, and that pig might never have had a cherry

in its life. Right. But there it is, cherry-flavored pig shit. I mean, organic chemistry class, one of the first things you do is you make the flavor banana, but you don't use any bananas. Oh, that's cool. You know, these chemicals exist, and when you get to fermentation, I mean, pig shit and wine are actually very similar because they're both fermentation. It's just that one's organized and one's really not. And so, like, you do get, these chemicals can just occur by mixing different stuff together. I mean, these guys actually have this wheel of their colors, but they're actually supposed to be tastes. And, you know, you sort of can pick along the, you know, the spectrum of like, oh, and they're really good. I mean, I could just get the basics,

but he could like pick up all these little notes. So there's that. But then you add into that what your brain is doing to that experience. And the brain's fooling itself. And your brain can, I mean, we can all have visual and audio hallucinations. Well, I mean, there's no reason why we wouldn't have taste hallucinations to some extent. I haven't seen a lot of work on it, but it's an interesting idea, right? But your brain can definitely tweak the experience. So you have these complex chemicals, and then you have this brain experience, and it's really hard to figure out what's real at the end of the day.

Because there could be that chemical in there, or it could be something that your brain is imagining. But when you're imagining it in a very, you know, when it comes to expectation in a very deep way, it's happening. Like, there is no separation between, you know, what's really happening in what's imagined, because your brain can make it happen. You can taste that smoked whatever to,

tobacco or whatever, even if it's not there, if your brain can create it. That's incredible. That's incredible. It's almost like, there's an analogy here. I'm not quite getting, but since we know that vision is entirely created in our brain, right? Our site is one thing, but it's just photons and things like that. But vision, things we see are created in our brain, it sounds like taste is similar and maybe smell also is similar, where we're getting like chemicals that are getting attached to receptors in our nose and whatnot. But then our brain says, that's a cherry, because our nose isn't going, that's a cherry. Our brain is just deciding that that's what a cherry smells like, I guess. I don't know. It's an interesting thought. I don't know that for a fact. I think that it is an interesting way to sort of approach that question. This kind of stuff hasn't been studied as much. It's not a lot of reason to study, like taste specifically, taste and smell that doesn't get as much attention. But the people who study placebos, especially some of the earlier ones, like in the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of them came from areas where they looked at perception and visual perception. And when you talk about vision, there is a lot that leads from the way your brain

processes what it sees to the way expectations are created. And you think about illusion. You know, I mean, a lot of this has ties with illusion. And I ended up actually speaking to some magicians and hypnotists for the book, not because they necessarily have a scientific perspective on this, but a lot of them have a really good gut sense of expectation. Sure. You can create a lot really interesting visual hallucinations through tweaking expectations, the way your brain is used to seeing things. A lot of these weird things that play with what you're seeing. It's just playing with your expectations. So in that way, that's how that ties in is your brain gets a lot of information and it has to sort through it. It has to create, always has to create expectations in order to

function. You can't just come into everything new. It's like people coming into, you know, politics or religious discussion and thinking they're not carrying any baggage from the rest of their life. Yeah. Like I'm entering this relationship with an open mind. I'm definitely not going to be suspicious of all the things you do that I was suspicious about my last girlfriend doing or whatever, right? Like it's not realistic. But that's the fundamental working of the brain. Like the brain uses everything it knows and then creates reality. And so for you to be like, oh, I am the only one who's entering this relationship like with a totally clean slate or I'm the only one who can look at this new alternative medicine like with a clear perspective you're kidding yourself you know of course your

brain is constantly working off of its history and its expectations you mentioned that the more we invest in something or you didn't put it in exactly those terms but we talked about the wine and the expensive wine and the more expensive it is the better your taste experience and things like that so does that follow then that let's say a pill placebo is maybe less effective than an injection, or if we're doing a treatment, me like rubbing on your shoulders might be less effective than me being like, oh, you've got to go into that giant MRI machine, and we've got to wire electrodes to you. Is that more powerful maybe? Like, what about suppositories? Asking for a friend. If your friend is French, then yes, suppositories will be more effective.

Placebo. Okay. For some reason, a lot of this stuff gets into some sort of fun, interesting stuff, but yes, they have compared different placebosives against each other. And for some reason, in France, suppositories are more effective than... Oh, I thought you were kidding. No. Is that really true? That's funny. That's a real thing. In Britain, foul-tasting place, placebos are more effective than nice-tasting ones. Generally-speaking injections are more effective than pills. Sham surgeries are more effective than all of them. Sam's surgery, you know, if you can get someone to fake a surgery with you, you're in a much better position. The classic one is Parkinson's. You know, they look at Parkinson's and they, they,

They measure sort of how much people are able to improve their range of motion. And they, you know, when you compare people who take placebo, because Parkinson's is a disease that's a chronic deficiency in dopamine. And dopamine is a reward chemical in the brain. And so it's all about expectation. It's a really highly placebo prone condition. And so, you know, if you give someone a pill and tell them it's going to cure their Parkinson's, it's not nearly as effective as if you give them a surgery, which again, isn't doing anything.

But then you see, oh, this is going to do some magical thing. you and you see just much better progress in terms of therapy than with the pill. And it gets back to the thing I was talking about earlier, which is the storytelling, which is also the theater around it. I mean, if you're doing a SAM surgery, you're going to also have to do checkups. When scientists are evaluating any surgery, there's usually a sham or placebo surgery component. And the doctors don't know which person got which. So everyone gets to go through the whole follow-up checkups, and they do the, you know, whatever else is involved, and they got people looking at them and they're getting a lot of attention. All these things,

increase the placebo response because it's a matter of theater and it's creating expectations. And so it makes sense. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Eric Vance. We'll be right back. Now back to Eric Vance on the Jordan Harbinger Show. This does make sense. And it sort of shed some light on things like homeopathy, right, where the more you dilute it, the more powerful it is.

And it's like, what? That doesn't make any sense to anybody who knows anything about science. But then when we look at it from a storytelling perspective, it's like, okay, well, fine, homeopathic stuff might work because we said it's going to, right? Is that kind of what's going on there? In the book, I talked to a woman, Natalie Graham, who she's a German doctor who got into homeopathy and then got out of it. And she had a really interesting take on it. One of her takeaways was she was just so impressed by how much time homeopaths had with their patients. You know, they had hours to talk about these issues and get to the.

heart of what's going on, you know, in someone's experience. And, you know, as a doctor, you get, you know, 10 minutes. And so that's a huge part. You don't see a lot of sort of drive-through soulless alternative medicine. I did go to one to an acupuncture, ER or hospital in China. And that was kind of interesting because you're not really used to that kind of like, oh, yeah, we're just going to stick to bus needles and you're going to get out the door. But generally speaking, alternative medicine tends to be a lot more interpersonal. There's a lot more time. Sure. That feeds the placebo response. It also feeds the placebo response in real medicine. Real medicine also relies on

placebos. So there's no reason why a real doctor, you know, or a medical doctor, can't also use placebos by taking time and talking to people and really you know them. But that's something you see, I think, for sure, in alternative medicine. The second thing that this woman took away from this was really tapping into people's histories. So, like, one of her patients had fled Nazi Germany in the snow, and she had these powerful memories of cold, and she was having trouble leaving the house. She was sort of a shut-in. And she prescribed her liquid snow,

which is known as water. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. It wasn't even hyper, like, diluted. It was just had formerly been frozen and was now not frozen.

And the fact that knowledge that it had been, like, snow, and that she was connecting to this thing in her history, you know, changes this woman's life around. And I'm not going to pretend like she was not incredibly helpful. if not healed through this process. Like, these things have value. You know, she's able to leave the house, and whenever she got nervous, she just drinks some of her melted snow.

She was able to connect on something very deep and tap into that expectation. So I don't want to come off as saying, you know, alternative medicines are useless. What I would say is they're very easy to take advantage of. And it's very easy to use to take advantage of other people. But this is how your brain works. Like, this is what we're stuck with. It reminds me of that movie with, I think it's Jim Carrey, the comedian Andy Kaufman. I don't know if you've seen it. It's an older movie. And he had cancer or

something. So he flies to like Cambodia to get the, you know where the healer like rubs your belly a lot and then pulls out your cancer, but it's just chicken guts that they have hidden up their sleeve? Yeah. He sort of sees the sleight of hand trick and he starts laughing because it's this like tragic comic thing. So that's where you cross the line, right? Because no matter what kind of placebo you have, you can maybe use it to alleviate a little pain, but you're not getting your cancer pulled out by this person. They're just throwing chicken guts out of their sleeve. So this is one of the most interesting things with placebo's, is that they don't affect everything the same. They don't affect every person the same.

So this is what makes it very difficult to understand, but it also makes it much more interesting. If placebo is always affected, like, say, 30% of the population, no matter what you did, that would be very dull. What happens is certain conditions like Parkinson's pain, anxiety, stomach issues, like irritable bowel syndrome is the classic. Maybe there's a few autoimmune diseases sometimes. and there's a few others that are like addiction is kind of a little tough for to understand. But there's this core group of conditions, usually chronic, where placebos are really effective. And then you look at something, so you've got like anxiety or depression in it. It's just very high placebo.

And then you look at something like obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the placebo rates are a lot lower. Or you look at something like Alzheimer's disease versus Parkinson's, and it's much, much lower. It's because the chemistry that's involved in Alzheimer's disease just doesn't lend itself. to the various things that your brain has on hand to alleviate these conditions, whereas these other ones do. So what that means is there are certain things for which placebos are very effective, and there are certain things that aren't. And the really diabolical part of this is when you look at cancer, placebos are very effective at treating all the symptoms of cancer, pain, nausea, even depression for a lot of people. They're not effective against tumors, as far as we know.

your brain just doesn't that we know of your brain just doesn't have a mechanism by which it can through expectation make the tumor go away so what you end up with is people who can sell you drugs that make you feel better or or placeboles that make you feel better but are actually you know not doing anything i mean steve jobs is kind of an example of that i mean i don't know what his experience was but it's something that people point to is like look here's someone it was his you know second run with cancer you know it was always going to be difficult but here's someone who may have had an easier time with the symptoms, you know, at the end, but the juice cleanse that he was taking, you know, was never going to affect the cancer. And what's sad about these people is a lot of them spend a lot of money trying to, you know, cure the cancer.

And they end up at the end, they end up, you know, in the hospital with doctors, you know, who are oncologists. At this point, it's too late. And there's not much thing you do when you talk to some of these doctors. I talked to them from my book. You know, what are you going to do? This person just spent nine months taking some sort of fringe therapy. And now they're in the hospital. And these things will get recorded as having died in the hospital and modern medicine has failed this person. There's no method to track how many people start out for however many months trying something else. And at the end of the day, you know, they end up in the same place. So this is where you have to go into the like a placebo half believing it, but also making sure that you're not going to endanger yourself, your pocketbook or the world. If someone's, you know, going to be promising tiger penis or whatever, you know, like. You have to trust but verify. Like, there's this line to walk because you can benefit from placebos. And to say, oh, I'm only going to rely on things that are, you know, completely evidence-based

is silly. We all have our little things that we like. And these things, you know, even fizzy drinks when I have a cold, that always makes me feel better. You're always going to have these things that you just believe work. And the key is to not go do deep. And always be cautious if someone says, take this and not conventional medicine. that's the one that really have to watch out for.

Someone's like, look, the only way this works is if you ignore all other forms of care. And there are people who, you know, really, you know, cause people to die as a result of this. Yeah, that is a shame. You would think that people who sell sham placebo stuff would also want you to be doing modern medicine so that they could say, look, I cured you. Probably wasn't that surgery you had. Probably really was the magic, you know, acanasia or whatever roots that I've been selling you. but I guess if they really believe in it, then they wouldn't do that, right? So it's almost like maybe they also believe in this.

It's a very difficult world. It's a world that's spent a lot of time sort of getting into and trying to understand. Yes, a lot of these therapies you see and a lot of these testimonials you see online. You know, people will say these things save their life. They will not mention that they were also getting traditional or conventional therapy. You know, they won't mention the chemotherapy they were getting at the same time. And this happens all the time. I mean, I know someone who swears that. I don't want to out this person. But I swear it there's an alternative therapy that helped him with his cancer, at the same time he was getting traditional or conventional therapy. So it's like, you know, we have these stories we tell ourselves. And these stories are very important. I mean, they are ourselves by, you know, by some measures. And so, you know, if someone tried some sort of therapy and then was also getting chemotherapy,

of course they're going to look to the thing that really had their passion. Right. Like it's the goat yoga that cured me. It's not the chemo. I'm sure it was the goat yoga. Exactly. But there is a darker side. There are especially, and one of the things we haven't talked about is the power of groups. And when you, and there's some really interesting experiments they've done looking at how peer pressure affects placebo's. And when you get people in groups, you do start seeing these magnifier effects. And so, you know, there are people who lead groups. There are, there's group thinking. There's a lot of things that can lead people to say, just do this. Don't trust the doctors. This is what the doctors don't want you know about. this. This is the classic. Like, do the thing that doctors don't want you to know about. And, you know, I've never met a doctor who's like, oh, I can't, you know, this person can't get better on,

you know, on some other therapy. Like, they have to get better on what I'm giving them. Like, come on, what kind of doctors are you talking about? They let their own kids die of something horrible because big pharma took them on a golf trip. Like, that doesn't really add up, folks. There are a lot of interesting dynamics here. And you start looking at big pharma on placebo. There's a lot of really interesting over us. But, you know, like, generally speaking, you have to be very careful when someone says, don't just trust us, don't trust anyone else. And that does, in my work, in my experience, it does tend to be more in group-related, placebo, or, you know, or whether you want to call it a cult, or when there's, you know, there's sort of a community to,

you know, even one that you're not really a part of, but it's like this sort of global community around one, I mean, homeopathy in some cases, can be like this where people will say, look, you know, you just, these traditional medicine or conventional medicines will counteract. They'll get in the way. And, and that's more, I think it's more a result of the community aspect. And what's interesting about that is it does magnify placebos. So if you were to create your own placebo, you'd probably want to have a community around it. Interesting. Yeah, I always figured that's why hypnosis on stages worked, because nobody wants to be the person up there that's like, y'all are acting like chickens. I don't feel anything, right? They're just like, okay, cluck, cluck,

click, I've never been able to get hypnotized, so maybe I'm a little biased, but I always just figure like, hey, what percentage of those people are just pretending? It's got to be half. I don't know. Well, I have a chapter on hypnosis. It's very different from placebo. I should say, if you give someone the same, you know, Narcan, basically, the same drug you take when you're having an overdose, like an opioid overdose. If you give that to someone having a placebo effect, the placebo effect, the placebo effect. Oh, wow. If you give that someone who's feeling less pain because of hypnosis, it doesn't. So hypnosis has a different mechanism. That's something we figured out. But there's a lot of overlap, and so I do get a,

hypnosis. And one of the things I do is I did talk to a few stage hypnotists. And one thing I learned is they are very good at a few things. And one of them is spotting people who are hypnotizable in a group. They're very good at finding hypnotizable. The second thing they're really good at is finding someone who is not hypnotizable, but who will not go against the crowd. Like someone who will walk like a chicken just because they don't want to be like, no, I'm not wanting. They find someone who's malleable. And one of the tricks that I heard about was if you see someone walking up, like, okay, we're going to get 10 people up on stage. Like, come on up. And if you see the person who's, like, laughing and making jokes, and then as soon as the light hits them and they're on

stage, they get really quiet, that's someone who you can probably, if you can't hypnotize them, you can probably fake it. Really? Yeah. The thing about stage hypnosis is that it's not really hypnosis. There are elements of hypnosis, but it's really a lot of stage craft. There are illusion techniques used in some stage hypnotist acts where, like, you're seeing a magic show. There are a lot more tricks. So it's not really hypnosis. I mean, you can't snap your fingers and hypnotize someone, you also can't hypnotize someone against their will. Not real hypnosis. But you can fake it. And that is something, you know, you're walking into their world. And there are elements of real hypnosis in stage hypnotism. But it's a show. Just like the magician is not really cutting someone in

half. People aren't really getting hypnotized. But sometimes these are often skilled hypnotists working. That's what's interesting is there's a ginger play there. But real hypnosis happens with a lot of trust, some time, and someone who's really skilled. And you do have to be careful. because you are mucking about in the brain a little bit. And so you want someone, I always tell people if you're going to get a hypnotist, you want to find someone who's got a degree in something else also. Like you don't want to find someone who's just hypnotist. There's no certification process for hypnosis. Oh, I see. So find somebody who's certified for something else that's actually somewhat related to it and also uses that as a technique. It's like when you find a lawyer, you don't just find somebody who specializes in getting people out of jail. You want somebody who's a lawyer that can also help you get out of prison. Exactly. Yeah. It's a lawyer. It's It's an interesting area. It's an issue. I actually tried hypnosis. I tried getting hypnotized. I'm not good at either one. But it's a very interesting. I think understudied and really it's sad. It's got a very interesting history. If you look at history of hypnosis, we're getting off track a little bit here. But, you know, it's one of the oldest psychological phenomena we've ever studied and we're still not know much about it and it's really interesting. And there's some crazy stories. I mean, it's one of those things that's always sort of interested me and I've always tried to have it done to me. And I've always gone like, hey, this doesn't work. And then the people are like, oh, you're resisting it. I'm like, no, you don't get it.

I want this to work for me. I would love for this to work to me. Are you kidding? This is like the coolest thing ever. Can you make me not afraid of speaking in front of large crowds of people or like in college? Can you make me like really confident with women? Like, what's going on? I would love for this to be able to work for me.

And they're like, no, no, you just want to be right. I'm like, I really don't want to be right that this isn't working. You know, trust me. If I want to be wrong in my entire life about one thing, this is probably it. Well, that's one of the interesting things about hypnosis is that there's a hypnotizability scale. It's called the Stanford scale. There's actually a couple scales. They're not perfect, but they're rough measurements of how hypnotizable you are.

I'm low. I think I'm a three out of 12. And if you're a three, your experience is so different from someone who's an 11. Like if someone's up in the higher area, like you can give them hallucinations. You can make them see things they don't actually see. You can make them forget the things happened. You just can't. And to some extent, those are the lucky people because they do have this tool you're talking about.

They can access their brain in a way that we can't. What causes this is a really, this is an area. I would love to have an answer to like exactly why people are hypnotizable. Generally, it's said that your hypnotize ability stays the same throughout your life. Now, there are some people I've talked to who say that actually that's not true and it just hasn't been studied enough, but that you could maybe move your hypnotizability up if you worked on it. But generally speaking, there's just some people, and this is where this problem comes with hypnosis, because, you know, as a patient, if you don't have it, it's just going to seem silly.

Sure. And then as a practitioner, you know, you can treat one person and literally see what almost seems like a miracle from hypnosis. and then turn around to the exact same thing to someone else and get nothing. You know, some of the guys that I talk to, the people I talk to who are, you know, who really dedicated their lives of this, it can be almost maddening. You know, because you know you've got something. You know you're studying something really powerful and interesting. And then it just falls flat because the person isn't hypnotizable.

Yeah. And so there are some really interesting ways that they're coming up with to maybe use virtual reality to sort of standardize hypnosis and maybe, you know, so you don't have to worry about the hypnotist end and just study the people. people being hypnotized. But it's just, I mean, we need to spend a lot more time and money on figuring out what the heck is going on. You're right that those people are in a different world and they are the lucky ones. Because imagine you're like, oh, I just can't stop eating sweet stuff. I have a sweet tooth. You go to somebody and they're like, my mom did this a long time ago and she was in a class

with somebody and one of the women in the class, they said like, imagine pouring a whole container of maple syrup in your mouth. And the woman was like disgusted by this, right? Because that was the idea. And I'm butchering this because I wasn't there. But later on, the woman was like, I have no trouble not eating sweets because I just imagine, like, my mouth full of this maple syrup and I don't want anything to do with it. And it just seems disgusting to me. And my mom's like, yeah, I ate a whole bag of cookies last week. So this shit doesn't work for me. You know, it was like a completely different effect from her and this other woman who, like, she bought a CD and went home and lost 30 pounds. And my mom's like, yeah, where are the Oreos, right? Yeah, I mean, that's interesting about all this stuff is the placebo question is actually a lot murkier because people do not. have that sort of consistency in terms of having placebo effects, but there does seem to be a difference. Some

people seem to be more suggestible. They're not necessarily also hypnotizable. Those two things are separate. But there are people who, you know, seem to respond better to placebos, and there are people who definitely respond to hypnosis better. And we kind of look down on these people a little bit. I think that society is like, you know, you always want to be the one who's not fooled. But if you are placebo-prone, which, again, it's a tough to tell. who those people are, or if you're hypnotizable, you're lucky. You have these access to these tools, these internal tools that you can make your life better. You also have to worry out, worry about nocebos and bad suggestions. Now, those aren't necessarily connected, but I would say,

one of the big takehomes is that if you can fool with your own mind through your expectations, good on you. Yeah, I'm curious about nocebo, which is like placebo's ugly sister or brother, gotta stay woke y'all but like this nocebo doesn't mean that placebo doesn't work right that's what i thought it meant it actually means causes harm or i will harm can you talk about what this is because that is sort of the flip side of this that's no that can actually be dangerous for people right if a placebo is an expectation of something good happening a nocebo is an expectation of something bad happening more pain not less pain more well i mean the thing that comes up a lot and whenever he starts looking at this is curses placebo pills do have side effects. So if you're giving a thousand people either a drug or a placebo,

and the drug has side effects, well, you will see people in the placebo group also having side effects. And those are no sepos. Those are someone whose stomach gets upset or gets headaches after taking a placebo pill because they expected it. These are harder to study because you can't walk up to a Parkinson's patient and be like, here, here's a pill that's going to make your Parkinson's worse. You know, you can't, a lot of things that just aren't very ethical if you wanted to study noceibos. Yeah. Maybe don't read the side effects, but that's kind of bad, right? Like, hey, there's a lot of things that can go wrong with this drug. Hold on. I don't want to know about any of that. Just give me the pill. Not really a good way to go about medical treatment either.

Yeah, it's a very interesting. And, you know, like, you can find nocebos anywhere. It doesn't have to be on the label. You know, I think a lot of Christian scientists have, when they go into medical experiences, have bad experiences because they are having, they've heard these horror stories. and Christmas science tend to throw around horror stories about going to hospitals and, you know, dying, which are true. But this is something that's very, you know, like it's never been studied. But I think in my experience, the community that I grew up in, like a lot of people had bad medical experiences because of negative expectations partly. But the thing that we do know, even though we can't study Nasebos very easily, is that they are easier to create and they do last longer. Those are two things that we found when you compare them in laboratories, you do see that they have these really interesting effects.

This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Eric Vance. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to this show. Thanks for supporting the advertisers. That's why, you know, I'm able to do this for a living and keep bringing this to you. If you want to check out all the deals and everything you've heard on the show, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That's where all the sponsors are, all the codes are.

Please do consider supporting those who support us and make this possible. And don't forget, we have worksheets for these episodes. All the good takeaways are on there. If you want some of the drills, the exercises, everything we talk about. talked about here on the show, they're all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Eric Vance. We're wired for fear on a very basic level, right? Nature favors the cautious. A natural selection, I should say, favors the cautious. So maybe nocebo is easier to trigger because it

keeps us alive, possibly? I don't know. I'm stretching on that one, probably. It's really hard to know how we evolved and how placebo's evolved. Animals do get placebos. babies get placebos, they do seem to be very fundamental. But that would make sense that, you know, caution and fear and negative expectations would be evolutionarily useful. At the same time, getting better by taking nothing is also really evolutionary useful. If you have a bunch of people, cavemen sitting around a campfire, and one of them, you know, who's sprained his ankle can eat grass and feel better, like, and go hunting the next day. Like, that's a good thing, right? Like, this is,

placebos are, they definitely have a use and they definitely evolved. And a lot of animals have them, we think. I heard you got cursed by a witch doctor on purpose. Not many people do that. What's going on there? Well, at the time I wrote the book, I was living in Mexico City. I got very interested in curses. Okay.

Centimwerte type stuff? Yeah, you know, Sanamerte, Santaria is very popular. Santamwerte is a little different in Mexico, but like... That's like some drug cartel stuff. Yeah, it's a whole, it's a whole cult of Christianity that's sort of, it's a own thing. But Santaria is sort of borrowed from Cuba and similar traditions around the Caribbean, and it's been, you know, embraced in Mexico. Mexico, there's a lot of blending. They also blend a lot of, you know, very traditional beliefs that may go all the way back to the ancient Mesoamericans.

I was just interested in learning more about them. I mean, I think they're very interesting. And Christian science, you know, I was raised with my own sort of style of curse. It's called mental malpractice. And so I got very interested in, like, how negative experiences work. I looked everywhere for evidence of someone who had been killed by just negative expectations. And the only ones I could find were maybe some of the Laotian communities that there's a book written about people who have called hypnopompic hallucinations, sort of this, when you wake and you can't move. Some people have the sort of... Like sleep paralysis. Yes. Yeah. So in some communities, that's associated with death and maybe just the notion of that might have killed some people.

Ooh, that's scary. I had that when I was a kid, and I would imagine that there was something sitting on my chest, and then I read about it years later, and it turns out that, like, a bajillion people throughout history have had these, like, sleep paralysis demons, and it's just like, it's really calm. It's like part of your brain wakes up, and the rest of you doesn't, so you can't move. Yeah. And then you have either a visual or some sort of, like, dream state, and, uh, thank God it stopped happening to me when I was older, because when I was younger, I thought it was, like, a sort of imaginary thing that would happen to me, and it wasn't a big. deal, but I think if it happened to me as an adult, I would legit have a heart attack. Yeah, it's a really, you know, I got into this a little bit with the book, and especially with like, I get into false memories a little bit, and there's some, you know, some stuff attached to that. But what's interesting is so I got very into sort of, you know, what damage can you do with negative expectations? Like I said, it's hard to study. You can't, there's a few things you can do with pain. Pain's about the only thing you can study when it comes to nocebos. You know, give someone more pain, give them a little pain and then have them expect more, you know, and you can see these effects.

But it's hard study. So I decided I would just go into a brouharia or like a witch doctor and see if I could get someone to curse me. I wasn't actually expecting the curse to do anything. But one of the things I learned about curses is that most of them only take effect once the person has been told they're cursed. So that's an important part of the curse is telling someone they're cursed. You curse someone and then you tell them the curse. That finishes the curse. And you might argue that's the whole curse is knowing that you're cursed. And so I was wondering what that knowledge would do to me. So I went to a couple different practitioners. It turns out that cursing is a really big part of traditional medicine or broucaria in Mexico. It seems like most of the industry seems to run on love potions and cursing ex-lovers. So that seems to be a... Yeah, that sounds about right.

And I talked to this guy and I was like, look, I want to get cursed. And he was look confused. And he was like, you mean like a guinea pig? And I was like, yeah. And he's, okay. You know, it's dangerous, right? And I said, you know, there we go. And so I went in and I spent about a week and a half.

cursed. You have to read the book to get the full story, but I did have a relatively traumatic event happened to me during that time. What I really took away from it is that your experience in the world is very much dependent on what you think your experience was. You know, if you want to see something in a negative way, if you want to see curses, if you want to see evil around every corner, it will be there. And it can have a physical, you know, a real physical effect on you, a measurable physical effect. I mean, you know, you think about even something as mechanical as the whole thing. heart, you know, like it really doesn't seem like it's a placebo-nicebo organ. And yet, what doctor is

going to be like, oh, yeah, stress and lots of fear is fine for your heart? Of course not. These are emotions, but, you know, these emotions, these expectations and ways of seeing the world have a huge physical effect on your body. And so we have a lot of power over that, especially with nocebos and understanding how fear works was very powerful. And I think something that we need to know a lot more about. Yeah, I do want to talk. about the false memories, especially the satanic panic that happened in California. This is like this crazy, I'll butcher the story here, but this neighborhood got it in their heads, right? That this preschool had been sacrificing snakes and making these kids do all this crazy stuff and that there'd

been abuse happening in this preschool and that kids were buried underneath it and all this stuff. And everyone just went absolutely bad shit crazy because of this delusion. And then it got even worse with people planting essentially false memories into some of these little children, which was the real abuse, kind of ironically. What was going on here? What was this? Well, it wasn't just California. It was all the way across the country. Oh, wow. There's a great FBI report that's now, I think it's public. I don't know if it was a public at the time, but it's now public and you can see at one point the FBI had gotten, I don't know if it was in one state or across the nation, more reports of like cult or satanic related murder than there had been murders. So like more than a hundred

percent of murders were also caused by satanic. Yes. There weren't enough murdered people to make up for all the reports of satanic murder. It was just a huge thing swept across the country and then it led to something called the memory wars, which was a big argument about whether or not memories, memories can be repressed and whether or not these memories that, you know, when you have these memories that are brought up from your childhood, whether or not that's a thing or whether or not you're just creating false memories. And this was a huge area of conversation. and really led to some destroyed lives. I mean, it's a very, you know, I talked to one woman who sadly,

I couldn't really go into her whole story in the book. But her husband, you know, has been in prison for a very long time for child molestation. And it was an event that basically, it was an impossible event. It would have taken an hour or two hours to do this thing. And he was only, they were only away for 10 minutes. And it's just very, when you look at the transcript that led to the testimony from the kids, Like, these were memories that were very clearly planted in the child's head. For instance, it was about spraying, you know, food on children.

And I won't get into details, but pretty heinous stuff. You know, and they asked the kid, did they put food on you? And they said, no. And they said, did they put ketchup on you? Yes. And it's like, well, kids like ketchup. You know, like you can't, when you're doing an interview with kids, you can't start suggesting things that happened to them.

Because I can't say kids are suggestible because it's not really, it hasn't really been shown to be true. but kids are eager to please at the very least. And, you know, they got good imagination. So if you keep asking them again and again, did something happen, and then you start describing it, did it happen like this? Did it happen like that? Eventually, they're going to say yes.

And if you do that under a hypnotic suggestion, it's even more powerful if you have someone who happens to be hypnotizable. So you had a lot of these kids and adults too, being questioned in really leading ways and then sometimes being hypnotized, which ironically, a lot of the satanic panic did come out of testimony that was taken, you know, memories that were created under hypnosis, which by many Christians is considered to be satanic itself, which it isn't, but like there's this interesting crossover there. And what ended up happening was a lot of innocent people went to jail.

And a lot of people's lives were ruined. You know, I talked to one girl in the book who's had a relatively normal childhood and then was told that her preschool teacher, years later told her preschool teacher was a satanic priest, and then she was, I think she was hypnotized, and then she, and given these memories, at least through several sessions, was given memories involving snakes and all these different kinds of things. There was a snake involved, but it was actually, they were on a camping trip and someone caught a snake. But that memory was turned into this ritual. And then later she realized these were false memories. And that back and forth is just very disorienting. And some people

never go back and they, you know, many people think they had these experiences and they didn't. And it's just destructive. So false memories are just very, very interesting. And they come from a place of suggestibility. They haven't been studied enough to really understand if they are connected to placebo's and to hypnosis. And that's the great thing about being a science writer is, you know, as I suppose as a scientist. The scientists will talk about this outside of meetings and have this like, I wonder if there's a connection there. If they can't really publish about it, you know, it's not really a lot known about it. But as a science writer, I can explore it as much as I want. And so there are these interesting connections between memory and also memory

feed placebos in a weird way because if you, you know, as a Christian scientist or as anyone who's had sort of healing outside of conventional medicine or even inside conventional medicine, the way you remember those healings is often much more dramatic than the way it actually happened. Like as soon as I took the pill or as soon as I realize this thing, the pain disappeared. Well, it doesn't actually usually happen that way. It takes a couple days. You don't remember it took a couple days. Like these things get more glorified in your memory, but that will feed your expectation for

the next time. So the next time you try that thing, you'll remember that miraculous healing you had, which if you actually go back and look at a lot of these things, you know, a lot of the healings I had, I think of them as being miraculous. But when you actually look at the timeline, it took a day, you know, it might have been regression to the mean. It could have been a lot of things. But my memory is really important. And that creates an expectation for the future. Because remember, the brain takes the past, applies to the present to predict the future. How does it work that we end up with a false memory? So do we just form memories in a certain way? And then like, there's a brain glitch in one of the steps so we end up with a false memory? How does it happen? I think a lot of us think memory is just pulling up video footage from the past. Right. And it's not. Memory is actually happens in three different stages. When it happens and there's consolidation and then there's retrieval. The thing happens and then consolidation is kind of a fuzzy, often happens during sleep. At some point it gets sort of turned from a short term memory into long term memory and then you retrieve it and remember it later. At any point in that stage, you can tweak the memory. You can change it when

you're consolidating it. When it's happening, you can see it wrong. When it's consolidating, you can tweak it. And then when you're remembering it, the more times you remember a thing, the more opportunities you have to change it. Is that why people's stories evolve over time? Yes. Your uncle will have a story about a time he caught a fish. And then by the time you're like 30 and hearing it for the 500th time, the fish was a shark and the boat was in the ocean instead of the pond in the back of his cabin. And he shot it with, like, you hear this all the time and even me like I pride myself on being pretty rational right but when I was younger I used to make up stories to seem interesting to adults especially and some of them are ridiculous stories just

like many kids tell but looking back not only were some of these stories actually impossible but I truly believed in some but definitely not all of them because I've told them I've even told stories to my wife where she'll start asking questions and then I will suddenly realize that this thing I thought happened when I was nine is completely, completely impossible. There's no possibility that it could have happened because the laws of physics would have had to just bend, or I would have had to have been as strong as I am now at age nine physically for something to be lifted or moved or thrown or whatever. It's just not possible. I mean, the classic one to look at is, you know, where were you on 9-11? Where were you when the, you know, Challenger went down? And people inevitably remember these things more dramatically than

they actually were. And memory is weird that way because, like one classic example, especially you're going further back is your perspective on a memory. If a memory gets old enough, for some reasons, some memories, you turn from being a participant to watching it happen. And what's interesting is that doesn't necessarily change the veracity of the memory. So I have some memories where I remember seeing myself. Obviously, I wasn't. And this is, I think it's called the panorama view or profile view. I forget what it's called. Your mind basically at some point just switches over to seeing the whole scene rather than seeing it from your eyes. And yet the memory stays the same. No one really knows why that happens. There's a lot of really interesting flaws that happen in memory, and a lot of it's around

storytelling. And that's where really the connection is between a lot of these things, the storytelling, the stories we tell ourselves in order to build expectations. And so, you know, whether it's the fish, or my favorite one when they do experiments on this is they implant memories by just repeating it over and over again to people about the time they went to Disneyland and met Bugs Bunny. And like, oh yeah, remember he gave you the live up and we put him a picture with Bugs Bunny. Remember he was like, put his arm around you? They sometimes even bring in like the mother of the person, the subject, and be like, yes, you went and, you know, and Bugs Bunny, oh, it's great. It was Mickey and Bugs, and they all hang out. And of course, what's wrong with that? Yeah. Yeah, Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character. Right. Yeah, no, he's Warner Brothers. So it would be illegal for him to be a

response to claims that these false memories were actually real memories that would be uncovered. And it's like, no, you can't uncover a memory of Bugs at Disney World. That didn't happen. I would fall for that, though. Like, I would 100%, I'd be like, yeah, sure, that happened. I would never even think to argue that point. You can almost see it with the paper collapse. Yeah, I can almost see it. Yeah, like him sitting there. It all gets back to like how malleable we are and also the importance of expectation and the stories we tell ourselves and how they affect our real lives. I mean, that's where a lot of these things overlap and have the potential to cause damage. Other than satanic abuse, you know, we see alien abductions. And it is tragically comical that people are more likely to believe that an alien and extraterrestrial

traveled 15,000 light years to have sex with them or collect their scenes. or whatever. People will believe that, but they won't believe like, hey, you know, your memories could be fallible. Your brain could have had these different things happening that are studied by science. And I'm like, nope, an alien traveled from another solar system to have sex with me. I have a child in another galaxy. It's like, okay. And it's easy to dismiss those people as totally wacko and mentally ill or something like that. But there's just a huge number of people that are convinced that that happened, just like the satanic panic. Yeah. There's a huge number of people that were grown-ass adults that should have known that there was not.

a secret tunnel underneath a preschool where children's ritually sacrificed bodies were buried by the teacher. Yeah, exactly. If I could just impart one lesson from all of this, it's okay. We're all fallible. Our brains are all fallible, and it's okay. We have this societal expectation, we have this societal, you know, sort of pressure to be correct and to be, you know, clear-eyed. None of us are. And once you accept that and realize that, look, my memories probably aren't right. You know, what I think cures me may be my own delusion, and that's okay. In some cases, it's even good. It makes a lot of the antipathy that at least some parts of our society have against each other, maybe eases it or makes it a little easier to understand. You know,

none of us are right. None of us have a clear picture of, you know, whether it's, I mean, you can extend out to politics, but, you know, certainly with health, none of us have a clear picture what's going on in our bodies. We're all malleable, and our memories are all fallible. you have to be skeptical of your own experience. People can be very skeptical of other people, but being skeptical of yourself is harder. And it doesn't mean you have to have self-doubt. It just means that you have to understand. You know, what you're seeing is based on a lot of expectations and a lot of things going on in your brain and that you shouldn't let your desire to be right hurt yourself or others. And that's, you know, I'm getting off a little bit of a tangent,

but that's tied up with all of this. And when you understand placebos, for example, the antipathy between people who are into traditional medicine, conventional medicine, and people who like alternative medicine disappears because you can understand that something can be all in your mind and still work. Like those things are not mutually exclusive. And there's nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with making a shit ton of money off of it, I think. But, you know, blaming someone for feeling better because they rubbed a crystal on their head is insane. If a crystal good work on me, I would have them everywhere. Having a little understanding for each other and understanding by having understanding about yourself that you're not right. Whatever you think,

good chance it's not 100% right. I think that would be the one message I like people to take. By knowing all of this stuff with the placebo effect and everything expectation, does it reduce our ability to take advantage of it? In other words, did you and I just screw this up for hundreds of thousands of people right now destroying their ability to harness these positive effects? reading my book will not affect your ability to have a placebo effect. You have to say that. That would be a bad economic decision if you said otherwise. Yes.

Writing my book might. I will say that I have very little faith to throw around anymore, and I do think I've sort of broken that part of my brain a little bit because I just, you know, I don't trust anything. But I've gotten pretty deep into this stuff. The thing about placebos is no matter what you think about them, they still work. You can't get rid of them. If you could get rid of them, we wouldn't have them. you can read my book over and over again, and you're not going to affect this. This is fundamental to who we are. We are gullible. And so thinking about this and getting into it isn't going to change

what your brain does. You know, nothing you can do does. It may make you a little bit harder to fool, and maybe, you know, maybe you won't have as many opportunities to, you know, have that amazing, oh, I found this new, you know, what is it, the QR band that goes around your wrist and then, you know, makes your chronic pain go away. But, you know, there are also a lot of things that blend. what we know scientifically and placebo's, you know, mindfulness is one of them, you know, where we don't fully understand how that works, and there is a lot of placebo involved in mindfulness, but there's also, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy in there. So there are ways that you can take these things in and apply them, or just good bedside manner if you're a doctor. Like the

power of bedside manner, you know, you might be throwing away 30% of your cure by being a dick, you know? Like, it's, if you're trying to help people, that tenderness, can be very powerful. You're not going to read my book or go into this topic or maybe even dive deeply in it on your own and lose this ability. This is something we're born with and this is something we're not getting rid of. Eric, thank you so much. Fascinating stuff. Really appreciate your time and your expertise. I thought the book was fascinating. We'll link to it in the show notes. The placebo effect and the hidden memories or the false memories, that alone is worth the read. The satanic panic story is entertainment value alone. It's enough to grab the book, in my opinion.

And so thank you once again for coming on the show and for all your time and expertise today. We've got a trailer of our interview with Caesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer. Caesar tells us how he went from impoverished Sinolaan kid to homeless immigrant to world famous dog training guru. We'll also learn how to communicate better with animals by understanding the priority of their senses compared to our own. Check out episode 162 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

When I was 10 years old, I told my mom, mom, when I go old, I'm going to be a drug dealer, and she's, shook. Oh, wow. Slap me across the face. They say, if you want to kill me, that's what you do. And when I was 13 years old, I told my mom, mom, you think you be the best dog train in the world? She turned around. She said, you can be whatever you want. So I spent Christmas and New Year's at the border trying to jump it. You get this reputation as the guy who can walk 30 dogs. That's when I can't. So that, it was in San Diego. You were kind of this underground guy for a while that could walk.

walk all these dogs in LA. In L.A. With no leash and the gangbangers are hanging out. Like, there goes the crazy guy with all the dogs. Don't mess with the guy with the dogs. My customers were NBA players, you know, NFL players. So your word is for... Nicholas Cage.

Yeah. Nicholas Cage? Nicholas Cage. Ben Diesel. How did they hear about you? Yeah. The Mexican guy in the street. You're washing limos and you're like, yeah, I want to be on TV.

Yeah. People must have been like, okay, buddy. Most of them. I was first interviewed by the LA Times. At the end of the conversation, the lady says, so what would you like to do next? I said, well, I would like to have a TV show. So I manifested the TV show way before producers came,

and I had no idea. I didn't know that dishonesty part in Hollywood. You better have a good pack of lawyers. For more from Caesar Milan, including how animal behavior is reflective of their human owners, check out episode 162 of the Jordan Harbinger show. I always find this brain stuff interesting. For example, if we could identify placebo-prone people,

doctors could open up a whole new suite of tools to treat pain and suffering among that subset of people. Because remember, it's not the same for everyone. Imagine not needing drugs at all or not needing as severe of drugs in certain people because you know that the placebo will work. Using expectation, the concept of expectation we talked about today, to modify pain, that seems ethical. But modifying memory using the same set of techniques somehow seems very unethical.

and I haven't quite wrapped my head around all that. I'm not quite in the philosophical area of thinking here. I'm curious what you think. By the way, I know we talked about this a little in the show. If you want to start experimenting with the psychology of placebo and expectation, there's some good guidelines to get started. Some of those will be in the worksheet. The rest are going to be in the book, of course, if you want to check out Eric's book.

I don't want you to try something that could hurt you or end up getting you addicted to something stupid like that. But placebo and expectation, it is real. But if you have to stretch your finances or go to some guru, then it's probably bullshit. If you're spending $10 a month on sugar pills and it's working, hey, good for you. Keep doing it. But if you're spending $40,000 a year on vitamin infusions from some fake doctor, you're getting conned.

Or a real doctor. You're still getting conned. Don't do things like rhino horn that make animals extinct. And absolutely, you should be running from anyone that says they can cure a disease or bring back lost memories of past lives or anything like that. Again, big thanks to Eric Vance. The book title is Suggestable You. We'll link it in the show notes.

Links to everything is always in the show notes. And please do use our website links if you buy the books or anything else. That always does help support the show. Worksheets for this episode are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on the old YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

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