Research Hit: Your Imagination is an Effective Placebo!

Researchers have shown that imagining taking a placebo is more effective than taking a physical placebo pill.

You’ve picked out a few ones on the placebo effect recently!

Indeed, this does come after my last post on the AI placebo effect.

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Research Hit: The AI Placebo Effect

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But the topic of placebo is fascinating because they are cheap, surprisingly effective, and without side effects, and in this case completely free…anyone can give themselves an imaginary placebo.

An imaginary placebo? That’s a new one - what is it?

Well, a placebo is normally used to denote, for example, a pill that has no active ingredients in it and in many cases it is as effective as taking a pill with active ingredients. This can also be dose specific.

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Research Hit: How Your Beliefs Influence Brain Responses

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What’s more surprising is that when people are informed that they are taking a placebo i.e. it has no active compounds, the placebo is still effective.

In this experiment by Anne Schienle et al. of the University of Graz in Austria they investigated taking a physical placebo, a pill with no active compounds, and imagining taking a placebo. This was described as a pill to reduce disgust. The third condition tested was passively viewing (pixelated i.e. not so disgusting) the disgust inducing images that then followed.

So the placebo was meant to reduce feelings of disgust?

Yes, and this was measured using participants responses but also with brain scanning to view what parts of the brain were activated, or not.

Oh and I’m intrigued - what happened?