The One You Feed - Erik Vance

Episode Date: February 28, 2017

a   Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Erik Vance about the power of our expectations Erik Vance is a native Bay Area writer replanted in Mexico as a non-native species. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. His work focuses on the human element of science – the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. His first book, Suggestible You, about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities was inspired by his feature in Discover.   In This Interview, Erik Vance and I Discuss... All the ways that our brain twists reality in order to make what it expects into reality How our brains are driven by expectations How we take the past, apply it to the present to predict the future Whether we were alive at the same time as saber tooth tigers How powerful the placebo effect How the placebo effect actually generates the neurochemicals in our brain we would expect to see It's not that we imagine we feel a certain way; we really do feel it. "It's All in Your Mind" is totally true How we have a wave of information from our brain, and a wave of information from our body; where they meet is what we feel His experience of being electro-shocked at the NIH How our brains don't want to be wrong How we all have different responses to placebo and type of placebos The gene that helps predict whether you might be a placebo responder Placebo and chronic pain Belief and expectation play a large role in chronic pain The trouble to create new drugs given such high placebo response rates How nocebo's work How much of our pain is create by our expectations The power of hypnosis Hypnosis compared to meditation How fallible our memories are How easy it is to create false memories in people     Please Support The Show with a Donation   It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's definitely some really exciting early indications that the stories we tell ourselves have a fundamental effect on our bodies. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Eric Vance, a biologist, rock climbing guide, environmental consultant, and environmental educator turned writer. His work focuses on the human element of science, the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. Eric has written for the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper's, National Geographic, and other publications. His first book is called Suggestible You. Before we get started, just a couple of general notes about the show. We have a Facebook group, which has lots of great discussion going on, lots of support for people who are there.

Go to Facebook and search for the One You Feed discussion group. That is free. Please, if you like the show, share it, tell somebody about it, help someone else's life get better. And finally, it's donations as part of our patron program that make this podcast possible. So go to oneyoufeed.net slash support and please give today. And here's the interview with Eric Vance. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show with Eric Vance. lives are a story that we tell ourselves. And what I found fascinating about your book was how profound and how deep that can really go within us. So I'm looking forward to exploring that, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that parable. I hadn't thought about it in many years. I guess in my life, what it means to me is, you know, you feed the ones you feed, but then they also tend to pull out table scraps and go through your garbage as well. And they seem to be able to sort of, you know, and sometimes they

do that with or without your permission. And it's important to remember when I think about that parable that it's not just like feeding them, but you also have to keep them from sort of lurking around the corners and picking up table scraps so that they can still rear up. Yeah, I think that's one of the things I like about the parable is it almost sounds like it's this close battle, right? And that the only way you're going to win is to give the one more food because it doesn't sound like the bad wolf is in any danger of start. Right. You know, and it's not about starving him. It's just kind of like, OK, I got to put my focus here on on this thing. And I think that's when I hear the parable. I love that idea that like it really is a battle.

Just when you think that that other wolf's gone, you know, he pops up someplace you didn't expect him. And he's been, you know, living on garbage, waiting for his moment. Exactly. Your book is really, as I said, the title was Suggestible You, Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. And the book really focuses around the placebo effect a lot. It talks about nocebos, the opposite of that. It talks about hypnosis, false memories, a variety of different things. But at a very high level, why don't you summarize kind of what the underlying premise is in the book? Basically, the book is about all the things your brain tells you that are so, that just simply

aren't so. So it's all the ways that your brain sort of twists reality in order to make what it expects into reality. And that's sort of the fundamental thing under this book is that your brain really operates on expectations. And it's something that people in psychology talk about, but the average listener may not have heard about is the role of expectations and predictions. And your brain goes to enormous lengths to make sure that the expectations that it has match reality. And a lot of what I talk about in the book sort of boil down to expectations and belief. And it pops up in a lot of different ways in our life where we think something is true and it may not be, but our brain can step in and make it true.

You quote Daniel Dennett saying the mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation generator. And we've talked with people on the show, talk about the mind being a meaning making machine. And those are really very similar things, right? It's the mind is trying to, it's got a lot of ways it does shortcuts, and it's applying those to things, even when they're not necessarily true. Fundamentally, the brain is taking the past, applying it to the present in order to predict the future. I mean, that's really fundamentally what you're talking about, what the brain does. And it could be something as simple as when you take a step and you assume the ground below you is going to be hard. I mean, you do every day. And I've experienced when it's not there.

Right. And there's this moment, you know, when these expectations are to get thrown out, like, you know, where, you know, or you're expecting to be soft and it's suddenly hard and your whole body jolts, right? Because, you know, you were prepared to be soft and it's suddenly hard uh and your whole body jolts right because you know you you were paired for this and it can be something as simple as that or if i drop this you know this pen it'll hit the ground like we have these expectations built in and and it could be something as complicated as you know that the hunting will be good on the plains this year you know like those are other kinds of predictions that we that our brains make and they're more complex and they're based on a lot of different information, using the past and pattern recognition, all these other things the brain does to create what is

essentially a prediction. Once you understand that, a lot of these sort of behaviors come into focus. But one of the things that comes into focus is that when you put these things together, they do form a story, meaning, like you said. Your brain is trying to figure out how things work so that, you know, when that saber tooth tiger comes around the corner, it knows what to do, you know, and it can, it can sort of operate at a higher level. And if you've never seen a saber tooth tiger before, and that's that meaning, that storytelling, that expectation, they're all tied up in the same very fundamental process of your brain. And that the fact that it's so fundamental is what makes it really interesting, because this is not some sort of side job that your brain does or some interesting quirk.

This is really at the heart of what it does. Were we alive at the same time as saber-toothed tigers? Because that's the example everybody uses for when we're talking about our evolutionary upbringing. I'm like, is they say that because we were actually alive then or is it just sort of a reference the north american megafauna would have gone extinct uh gosh what uh 15 000 years ago and uh and we were definitely around so in north america we definitely would have run into saber-toothed tigers but excellent us i would

have probably been you know ancestors were you know trying to figure out how to put both together in Norway. But yeah, we generally were here. effect actually works, how powerful it can be. And the other thing that I think really, when I read it, it just sort of shocked me, was that, you know, when I tend to think of something like the placebo effect, I think, well, it's just all in your mind, which, again, it is. But what I found completely fascinating is that your brain is actually generating the chemicals it would be generating if that effect was really happening. So if you're experiencing a reduction of pain, your brain is increasing your endorphins or your opioids in a way that mimics what pain blocking would look like. And to me, that was stunning. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that, but it really is powerful. You know, ever since I was a little kid, I've imagined my brain as being this guy controlling things.

He's got a little telephone. He's talking to all the other parts of your body. It's just sort of the way I conceptualize it. But now that I've sort of done this research, it's easier to think of it more as a guy with a giant switchboard in front of him. And your brain does a lot of things. But one of the things it's doing

is it's playing with a ton of different kinds of chemicals. You know, turn one up, turn the other one down. And there's a lot of this happening where the brain is constantly self regulating and trying to get towards sort of some sort of homeostasis. And it's constantly twiddling these knobs. And these knobs are attached to real drugs. If you give yourself a shot of morphine, an opioid to kill the pain that you're feeling from something, how different is that than if your brain releases that a very, very similar drug to a very specific spot in your brain in order to equally deal with pain? And in fact, that might be what

your brain is doing all the time, every day, all day. And that's something, it's like a weird transition once you realize, yeah, it's all in your mind, but that's where everything is. There's a lot going on there. There's chemistry. And then there's actually a lot of really complicated genetics that are informing how your brain will perceive different types of pain. This is not psychosis or psychology. This is real brain chemistry. Right. You're not imagining it. It's really happening in your brain. It's just being triggered by something internal to you versus something external to you. You know, in some cases, people might be imagining it, but like, you can't separate one from the

other. You know, like, how would you ever pull the two apart? Attempts have been made, but you can measure the body's reaction to, like I say, a placebo effect, like a pain placebo effect. And when people say they feel less pain, sure enough, their body is responding as if they feel less pain, things that you can't fake, um, skin connectivity. And, uh, and so at that point, you know, you can't get any more real than that. I mean, if your body's responding, then it's happening. It's real. There were a lot of amazing things in the book for me, that particular idea that just your expectation could change the way your brain chemistry is working to, to mimic what a drug would be doing,

you know, shows how powerful it is. And for this show, so much of what we talk about is more, you know, sort of mental day to day, what are the paradigms and the models our brain works in. And it was just a stark reminder to me of how much reality is really created by us. You're absolutely right. This has been played a lot with Hollywood, but I can't tell you the number of times, you know, working on this book that my mind was just blown in this very same way, just sort of you whack on a table that you're feeling something that's real, but you know, the colors, the way it feels in your knuckles, everything else, all the other information is coming into you. And, you know, all the other information that's coming into you.

And, you know, that's all created by your brain. And, in fact, a really clever scientist, a guy by the name of Irving Kirsch, who's really pioneered placebo work, he told me that there's a wave of information that's coming from your brain about what, you know, expectations and all these beliefs and things, and it collides with a wave of information that's coming from your body. And that's, you know, what your body's feeling how you know what's going on around you and where those two things collide that's what reality is because sometimes they don't match up but the one that wins where those two things collide that's what we know of as as what is and uh with the placebo effect in some ways there's a disconnect there what your body's

telling you is happening is different from what your brain is telling you. And when the brain wins, then you have these effects where your brain sort of papers over what it was feeling. Yeah, I thought that what you just said there about the brain is sending a signal, the body's sending a signal, and they meet in the middle and merge into something is one of the best descriptions of the mind-body connection I think I'd ever heard. It, in a way, that really made a lot of sense to me, because there's always this question of, you know, the Smiths, you know, does the mind rule the body, or does the body rule the mind? You know, I don't know. People jump on one side of that, and I love that, because it talks about how it's both.

It's really in the middle of those two things that perception arises. Obviously, I'm not the first person to say that, to say that the mind and the body aren't actually separate, but when you start looking at some of these things, take dopamine. Dopamine's a big player in this, or something called ghrelin. These are chemicals that, well, dopamine has like 50 different jobs in the body. It does all these different kinds of things. Part of it is creating its rewards, and it's how we process rewards, which is why you get a boost of it when you win at the slots or at poker. But another thing is movement, which is why it's involved in Parkinson's. And another thing is stomach. And so these brain chemicals you think of as doing

a specific thing, and then it turns out it's involved in stomach digestion. And then there's no real break between the mind and the body, because so many of these things are really interconnected. And, you know, these chemicals do double duty and they work in the body and they work in bizarre ways that aren't connected to each other at all. And once you get used to that, all this becomes a lot more easy to wrap your head around. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think when people are like, well, the mind-body connection, I'm like, it seems pretty obvious, right? They're wired together.

And to your point, the chemicals are flowing. This doesn't seem to be a topic that really should be a lot of debate. But I just loved the way that guy phrased that as a way to think about it. So you tell a story in the book about you getting your first, I would say, real experience of the placebo effect at the NIH. Can you tell that story? Sure. Yeah. You know, I was working on a magazine piece for Discover Magazine on the placebo effect, and I've been fascinated by this. I should mention, I was raised in Christian science, so I didn't go to a doctor until I was 18 years old. And I don't practice Christian science anymore, but I was always fascinated with the things that I saw when I was growing up. So,

when I got this opportunity to work on the story, I sort of leapt at it. And one of the scientists I visited, her name was Luana Colocca, and she's now at the University of Maryland, a phenomenal researcher. And she's really pioneered a lot of these questions. She agreed to electrocute me for half an hour or so. I think she used the word nociception tolerance paradigm or something like that. I didn't really catch it until I showed up there. She hooked me up to this machine that would give me really painful shocks. And every time I saw a green light, she'd give me a little sort of pinch or just be like a little shock that would just sort of sort of irritate me. Every time I saw a red light,

she'd give me a big one that would actually make my foot twitch. That's how powerful it was. It would sort of, you know, really get my attention. and then she'd go back and forth boom boom boom green red green red to the point where every time i saw that red light i was just like you know oh god no no no and and she had a pause very clever woman she had a pause sort of between the color and the the shock so you really had a split second to really think about what was about to happen. And on the last round, it was about 25 minutes, it felt like the lower one had been turned up just a little bit. It was sort of like a harder pinch. And then the high one still sort of made my foot twitch. And when she came in afterwards, she said, you know, you did a great job. And she

had given me all these really bizarre instructions about this thing that was attached to my finger. So I was, it was hard to know what to focus on. And she'd done it on purpose because she came in and she said, look on that last time around, I gave you the big one every time. And I'm not crazy. You know, I wasn't trying to please her, you know, or tell her what she wanted to hear. Like, I didn't feel the pain. My foot didn't twitch. It really hit home that this was not some sort of, you know, thing that happened to other people. Like it could happen to you, you know, in an instant. And it's, you know, it's real. You could see your foot not twitching. I swear I did not feel that pain. And what was happening is my brain was stepping in. It had this expectation that was built over the previous

rounds that green meant lower pain. And when didn't happen my brain stepped in and self-medicated itself so that it would match expectation would match reality and it's the same idea behind when you take a pill and you want it to make you uh uh you know you want to like make some pain maybe make a headache go away you know you have this expectation and if it doesn't happen well then your brain just steps in makes it happen Your brain doesn't want to be wrong. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason

bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Before you hit that fast-forward button on your podcast app, quick thing. I'm going to run a quick contest between this Tuesday and next Tuesday. So from when this episode launches until when the next one launches, anybody who donates at any level, I will ship you five books of guests who have been on the show. So a little special gift in addition to the gifts that are out there. If you go, I'll just choose randomly at any level and you'll get five books sent to you, but you've got to do it this week. And doing it this week is good because donating to the One You Feed is something that makes you feel better. It's scientifically been proven. Chris isn't here

to verify my facts, but I know it's good for you. So oneyoufeed.net slash support. Do it this week, any level, and get entered into a contest to win five books from authors who have appeared on The One You Feed. So do it now before you forget. And here's the rest of the episode. In general, the science shows, and you talk about in the book, that some people have stronger placebo responses than others, and that it can even vary depending on what the thing is. So a pill really does it for you, whereas for Sally, if she gets Reiki, she thinks that's healed her, right? So the placebo effect can be different

among different things, and that some people just have more of a tendency towards them than others. This is actually the holy grail of placebo research has been trying to determine if this is true. Now, my personal belief is it's got to be true. Like, it feels so right. But I should say that it's not as easy as you make it sound and as I wish it would be. That's what really separates placebos from hypnosis. Hypnosis, people tend to be hypnotizable. If they're hypnotizable, they tend to stay that way. If they're not, they tend to stay that way. And it doesn't change throughout someone's life much. Placebo changes from day to day. And it changes from one thing to the next.

And yes, there are these sort of trends where you see like a bigger pill tends to work, be more effective than a smaller pill. Yellow pills for depression tend to work better than blue pills. Injections tend to work better than those. And sham surgery, you know, like Parkinson's, sham surgery works far better than a sham pill. So those are sort of trends, but predicting who's going to respond or who's going to respond to which thing, that's sort of been the goal or this holy grail for research and and i i profiled some some researchers who are doing who have found a potential solution in genetics and that research really to me shows me why these things are so complicated because these chemicals are working against each other they're working with each other they're constantly

changing and it helps explain why these placebo responders that people have been looking for, scientists have been looking for them for 60 years, why they haven't been easy to find because there are so many complex dynamics at play. But it does seem like if we can understand those dynamics better, then yes, we can figure out who these people are and who's going to respond to what placebos. And so not there yet, but that's sort of this wonderful potential goal. And you can look at this one gene and I'll just, you know, and it's COMPT, C-O-M-T. And if you've done 20, 23andMe, you can look up and see which one you are. And there's one that really helps predict if you're going to be a placebo responder or not, but it's not

definite. I wish we were as certain as you made it sound, but I think someday we may be. When anybody's reading a book, you're sort of thinking through it in your own experience. So what's it's been like for me? I was thinking of an experience where I've been on certain types of medicine for a long time. And if I don't take them, I tend to, you know, about 12 hours later, start having really bad symptoms. And I was just thinking about like, if I was responding strongly to the placebo, you would think that those symptoms wouldn't necessarily kick in. Cause I don't, I don't actually, well, maybe subconsciously I do, but I don't certainly consciously know if I forgot to take my medicine or not. It's like,

I just never thought of it. And so I was just thinking of it through that lens of, it sounds like what you're saying is sometimes that might work placebo works for me and other times it doesn't all of us experience placebo effects like to say oh i don't it doesn't happen to me like and my favorite thing people tell me it's like oh i you know uh i'm not i'm not gullible this you know this stuff is really real this thing i have yes you are gullible we're all gullible um and so that's like that's the first thing but but you're right you do when it comes to your own health you do have to come to understand yourself a little bit like what what stories appeal to you i mean we've all had this experience there's some

people who can just who can just you know try some placebo thing or put you know take a crystal rubber of their body and they just feel better and there's some people that just don't and i do believe in my heart that there are some people who are just placebo prone, and we just haven't been able to figure out how to isolate them. But I feel like we know them. I feel like I've met them. But for the individual, it's about knowing sort of what resonates with you, I think, and thinking about yourself as, you know, what kinds of stories, what kinds of things feel like they should be working, and knowing when that's appropriate, when it's not appropriate to play with yourself that way. Yeah. You mentioned a placebo response you have,

which is the same one I have slightly different brand, but you talked about airborne for not getting sick. You know, I believe in emergency, like, you know, anybody's sick around me. I just start taking a ton of it and I'm, you know, I'm convinced it works. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily emergency doing it, but I'm convinced that whatever it is, whether it's me believing it or not, that seems to be pretty effective for me. I shouldn't say that because tomorrow I'll probably come down with the flu, but. I will say this much. Well, first of all, for me, it's that fizziness, that fizziness of the airborne. Love office ulcer. It just gets me right away. Oh, my God. I can take L-cells for anything.

I'm sure it would help. Right. Just the fizziness. It's got to be doing something. And this is something that scientists often refer to as an active placebo because it's doing something. It's just not the thing that you think it is. It's an important thing to know about yourself. It's also important to know when these things aren't appropriate.

And a lot of this stuff, I said, if you read my book, it's not like it'll take away your ability to have a placebo effect. If you write my book, it might. I'm not sure that I can, I may have hurt my own ability to have placebo effects. But if you read it, because a lot of these things are actually innate, they're unconscious. And that's one of the really exciting areas of placebo research is trying to separate conscious from unconscious placebos and the and these would be you know a conscious placebo would be when someone tells you this really remarkable story about this thing they're going to do to you and they do it and you feel better because you heard this great story and that's sort of a conscious process but there's the unconscious ones that are really you know from

from experience that you sort of that has sort of been ingrained in you through classical conditioning or some other form of repetitive sort of experience, that you actually, like, you know, if you see a white coat, if you take a pill, for a lot of people, it doesn't matter what you're consciously thinking, it's going to trigger certain responses because your body is going to do it. and so, you know, that fizzy drink, you know, it may not matter, or in your case, the emergency, it may not matter what you're thinking about it. It might just work anyway, because your body's been conditioned. Right. Let's talk a little bit about chronic pain. There was a lot of different parts in the book

about chronic pain. And, and I've had a couple of people on the show who suffer from chronic pain or chronic illness. And we talk about how they can increase their ability by working on it mentally. What were you finding as you did this book about chronic pain? Pain is probably the perfect place to really understand where placebo and belief meets health. And when you talk to people who study chronic pain, especially people who treat chronic pain, none of the stuff I talk about in the book is terribly new to them. They deal with this every day because belief and expectation play a huge role in chronic pain. And it makes it really hard to come up with new treatments. You think about drugs for chronic pain, getting over the placebo effect is enormous. You're talking about,

you know, levels of 50, 60% placebo response in large trials. I mean, how do you get a drug over 50%? I mean, it's... It's got to be morphine. Yeah, I mean, even morphine, you know, has its limits. Certain people don't respond to morphine. And so, it makes it really hard to come up with drugs and also makes it very hard to start trials of drugs. How do you know if you're going down the right pathway, you know, with the early stages of a drug trial? And it also means that a lot of different things can help chronic pain patients. And one of the doctors I talked to, I thought one of the best chronic pain doctors I ever talked to, Sean Mackey at Stanford. You know, he says, you know, he, first of all, he's desperate for anything.

I mean, he says he's only able to help 40% of his patients, or I think he said cure. But, you know, he said, if you're a baseball player, you're making millions. But as a doctor, that's not real good. Right. You know, and it's just, it's because it's so hard. And these things can get entrenched. And a lot of people believe that your brain sort of creates these habits of feeling pain and experiencing pain. Once it's in that habit, it's very hard to get out of.

So he will encourage people to go back to church. magnetic stimulation even though it it doesn't really outperform placebos anything in order to get an edge on uh on this this really really multi-headed beast that is chronic pain and in so many cases the source of the pain is obvious but in other cases it's not you have people who have fibromyalgia or neuralgia and it's not and people are suffering people are you know many of them have had their lives ruined and i've spoken to a lot of them and it's not and people are suffering people are you know many of them have had their lives ruined and i've spoken to a lot of them and it's not clear how this pain can be treated because it's created by the brain and the difference between like purely a chronic pain is purely created in the brain versus chronic pain from a back surgery you got 20 years ago i mean i

don't i don't know that anyone really knows what the difference is there. And so it makes it very difficult to treat. And placebos, for good or for ill, placebos and charlatans have worked their way into that field for, you know, hundreds, thousands of years. People have looked to all kinds of inert substances to try and treat chronic pain. It's on the internet or late night TV every day, you can see these opportunities to treat chronic pain. And if it works, then it works. And it's hard to argue that when you see the results, you can't argue that. So you talk about the nocebo response, which is basically the opposite, right? I imagine something's going to hurt, so it really hurts. And it seems like that's a big piece of chronic pain also is the expectation and the way we're viewing it and looking at it. Nocebos are tough to study. And you can look at

them through pain and you can look at through some of the brain pathways and scientists, you know, Luana, the person who shocked me, she has really pioneered a lot of this work in nocebos. But they're hard to study because, you know, you can't go to, like, say, a Parkinson's patient and say, here, take this pill. It'll make your Parkinson's worse. You can't go to a depressed patient and say, this is going to make your depression worse. It's just, you know, that's just not right. Right. chronic pain, the relationship between nocebos and chronic pain, how much of your pain is, you know,

is created by your expectation? That is a very difficult question. And I talked to a lot of pain doctors who struggle with this, you know, they have these patients that tell these stories like these big, muscular sort of doc workers who come in with this, you know, no sign of pain, no physical, you know, symptoms at all. And they're feeling this crippling pain and they can't work. And then these old ladies come in, you know, who had a little crick in their back, you know, while gardening. So, they come in and, you know, their hips are completely disintegrated and they've got all these problems and yet they don't feel any pain and these other people do. And what's the difference between these two people is one of the great mysteries of, you know, certainly of pain research, but I think also of brain science.

It's just, I think when we crack that, it's going to be a whole new day. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you talk in the book about hypnosis, and you say that, you know, it seems that people are very inclined to be more easily or less easily hypnotized. And you made a comparison in the book between meditation and hypnosis. And I'll read from the book. So studies suggest that having a busy mind can limit a person's ability to manage pain. Imagine pain management is a skill like running or weightlifting.

Imagine pain management is a skill like running or weightlifting. According to Jensen, hypnosis is a little like taking an already strong sprinter to the gym and pushing her to a whole new level. Meditation is more like what happens when a couch potato who has never worked out a day in his life drastically changes his eating habits and starts running every day. So the question I had coming out of that, because that couch potato could eventually become a great sprinter, right? If you think about it in the real world. So does that mean that meditation done over a period of time might increase your ability to be hypnotized? Has anybody looked at that at all? No. And that's a great question. I mean, uh, this, first of all, um, you know, hypnosis is one of the most poorly studied, fascinating topics in all of sciences. It drives me nuts that more people don't study it because the applications are incredible. has this, you know, this ability, you know, the same scientist told me about this guy who, you know, got hypnotized and he had these full body burns and they were like pulling off his

bandages and scrubbing out these burns and he didn't feel any of it. Um, because, and he, he wasn't asleep. He was awake, but he just wasn't feeling it because he had been hypnotized. That, that's something we should understand. And we know it's not being studied enough, but what they were referring to is these sort of different types of brainwaves that are, let's just say they're associated with hypnosis versus meditation. We often think of them as sort of like this brainwave happens right when you start meditating and then stops when you don't. There's another one for hypnosis. It's not that simple, but there are different brainwaves that seem to be associated with these different things. And that's what they're looking at, and that's how they sort of came up with that analogy and yes um in both cases these are certainly in meditation there's there's these

opportunities for building skills for building these abilities uh it probably is not the exact same mechanism as hypnosis so you know it's not like you can they're interchangeable but there is the skill building thing now with hypnosis there's not really that same skill building ability there is a certain limit if you're not hypnotizable you know it's not clear that you can make yourself more so though though i i think if we studied it more we'd find out that there are ways to become more hypnotizable i just i think that just hasn't been explored as much as it could have been um but it's it's certainly not like i mean i think i think that's the difference

between those two things and when you make that i think it's what he was trying to get at was with these types of brain waves um there is uh there that one thing is, you know, you're sort of flexing these muscles or you're building these muscles. So this is not really the topic of your book at all, but you reference it in the book, so I want to talk about it. So you talk about, well, actually it is a topic because you talk about false memories, and I find that's a fascinating area, and I don't think we're going to have time to get in there to that. But you do reference a book where somebody talks about the seven sins of memory, and you list what they are, and you said that your favorite one is absent-mindedness. And so I'm curious because, A, I have a terrible memory, and B, I am very absent-minded.

I just wanted to hear more about that. Okay, so I think what you're referring to is Daniel Schachter's book, and it's one of the sort of the Bibles of memory research, and he's just one of the greatest researchers in this area. And all of them get to is this notion that memory is not always as reliable as you think it is. And what you experience, you know, what you think of as being memory, we always have this, like, image of this video. It's like a picture you pull out. Yeah. And you can, like, instant recall.

In the movies, in fact, you know, people do so, like, through hypnosis. They'll, like, go in and see a place they used to be and look for details they hadn't seen the first time. Oh, yeah, there was this wall. Right, right. The clock was on the wall. That doesn't exist. You should never mix hypnosis and memories. They don't go together well because their memories are really fallible and they're easy to twist. And that's sort of what he's getting at with that book is all the different ways that your memory can fail you.

I don't know if failure is the right word, but that we are fallible. And absent-mindedness fits into one that's, God knows, it's the bane of my existence. And false memories is another one where you can create things and you can become very convinced that these things happen when they didn't. And there is an element of suggestibility. This is why I sort of put this in the book with,

because I'm a science writer, not a scientist, I can go a little further away from, you know, established science. And I put this in there to be provocative because this is something, it is an element of suggestibility. And scientists will talk about this after the interview a lot about, you know, what if there was some connection there. And the way I've connected it in my mind is placebos are a suggestion for the future. If you take this, you will feel better. You know, this will make you feel this way. Hypnosis is very much a suggestion for the present.

You're walking through a field and you can feel the pain drifting off of you like autumn leaves. This imagery that hypnotists use is always in the present. And if that's true, then false memories feel like a they're a suggestion for the past there's this they're they're sort of suggesting that something that already happened happened differently than it than it did or didn't happen at all um and that's and it's it's hard not to get drawn in and fascinated by that when you're looking at these these these issues sort of and and you know in total and and you can't help but wonder if there's not some connection there. Our brains are fallible, and we have these stories we tell

ourselves, and some of those stories are stories about our lives and what's happened to us, and it feels very much the same, though that direct connection hasn't been found yet. There's been a lot lately coming out about a lot of psychological studies and the inability to replicate them. Is this a very robust area of study? And most things that you're talking about are, you know, do we have a pretty high level of confidence? Yeah, you know what, this is something that I really take very seriously. As I said, I'm not a scientist. I'm a science writer, you know, and I take a lot of people, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of research, and I sort of combined it in this book. There's a lot of information in there. Hopefully a lot of it's

fun and easy to read. But I didn't have a lot of time for studies that I didn't think were robust. And if you look at some of the stuff I talked about, you know, the internal pharmacies and how your brain releases opioids in order to treat your pain well this goes back to the 70s you know 1978 i think was when uh people first really linked placebos to opioids which at the time were basically you know the newly discovered endorphins that that had been discovered only a few years before. And it was decades of scientists really in obscurity hacking away at these ideas piece at a time until we could start imaging them. And when scientists started imaging them in like 2000,

you really started seeing things fit in a way that made sense with all the science that had come before. So when you see this continuity and these ideas sort of holding true, yeah, this is all pretty sound science. And the big question is where we go from here, you know, like what the science is coming next. And, you know, a lot of the scientists I talked to,

Luana, another guy by the name of Tor Weger, I mean, these are really solid scientists. Tor Weger, one of the guys who first imaged the placebo effect, he understands the statistics behind imaging better than almost any other scientists I've talked to, brain scientists I've talked to. So I feel very confident about all of the sciences in this book. I'm very curious to see what comes next and if that solid science continues. Excellent. So we're going to wrap up here in a minute, but I want to talk about one other study. And I can't remember whether we've talked about it on this show or not, but it just blows my mind

when I hear it. And it's the study about the maids and exercise. Can you, can you share that story? Or that, that study? It's not a story. It's a study. It's funny you bring this up right after i talk about the solid science this is actually one of those studies i really wish had been continued longer and this is an area so this is um this is a study by a researcher now at stanford uh alia crumb really a bright young woman who's been um fascinated with some of these same questions that i have and she she did this study years ago. I think it was part of her graduate work,

looking at sort of the stories that were told to people who worked in hotels. And these people, when she asked them about how much exercise they got, they say they got very, very little, and they described their lack of exercise. Then with half of them, she gave them a presentation where they talked about how much exercise they're getting while they're working every day, how much their work actually helps them be fit. the way that their bodies change and what she noticed some some physiological differences in the way that sort of the the heart health and a couple other things with how these women responded just the information that actually every day you're you're working out you're actually getting exercise just by working and that realization had seemed to have an effect in their body now what she wasn't able to do is to track them then for the next 10 years or whatever and really look at the long-term effects of that knowledge of the

knowledge that you know it's like the same thing that uh fitbit does you know when you put these things in your wrist and suddenly you see how much you're walking every day you feel like you're exercising more very likely it's a huge effect on your. This is an area where we do need more science. We need 10 more people like Alia Crum working on this because it's just, you know, she's, it's just so fascinating what she's been able to dig up. She did another study where just telling people the calorie count in a shake made a difference to actually physiological difference to their bodies. And one shake was sort of a very heavy, I think it was a 600-calorie heavy sort of indulgent shake. And the other one was a 150-calorie sort of diet shake. Well, both of them were 300 calories.

Neither of them, they were the same shake, but they were in different packaging. And she actually saw a change in ghrelin, which is a that your your stomach tells your brain that it's full and also as part of the digestive process so part of your metabolism um and that actually changed in the people who were told that they were uh they had a heavier shake that ramped up became much more active so again you know i'd love to track these people for you know years and put a bunch of money into sort of finding out how this affects them over the long term because we don't know that. But there's definitely some really exciting early indications that the stories we tell ourselves have a fundamental effect on our bodies. So the study you were just discussing, you were told either you had a a very high-calorie shake or a low-calorie shake. They were both exactly the same, and the people who believed they were getting a high-calorie shake felt more full. And not just felt it, but you could see the chemical change in them that signals being full. I don't know if they felt more full. The chemical, the sort of elusive chemical called ghrelin, you can read about it, it's a fascinating chemical,

those levels changed. I don't think there was anything to how, response to how they felt, but basically their body was reacting as if it was having a very large meal, whereas the other people's bodies were reacting as if they weren't having a large meal. And tracking that over time, obviously, there's all kinds of health implications involved there. However, you know, she was lying to them. And that's the other underlying problem with this is, you know, there's deception in this. A study like that circles all the way back to the beginning where I said, kind of what blows me away about this is if you told me that they felt more full, I'd go, yeah, well, the brain, you know, it's, you know, it's just your perception. But it just fascinates me also that biochemically

things change. It's just, it gives me a different appreciation for how profound these things are. So we're going to wrap up. Thanks so much, Eric. I enjoyed the book. If for listeners, if you like science writing, there were way more fascinating things in the book than we got to. So if you like good science writing, you like this sort of stuff, you like reading about studies, Eric's book is a great one. I'd recommend it. If you do decide you want to get it, just go to our website, to our show notes, and

you can buy it via Amazon there, and we get a few cents, which helps out a little bit. But thank you so much, Eric, for coming on. Eric, thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Okay. Take care. All right. Yeah.

Anytime. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.