You Are Not So Smart Podcast - The Placebo Effect

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David McCreney: There's no such thing as a long-furn placebo auditory battery, but there is such a thing as the placebo effect. And if I properly primed you to expect that you're going to feel ASMR right before you felt the fake placebo thing then maybe some of you felt a tingling. If you did, that would not actually be weird because all sorts of strange things can be produced by the Placebo effect. We'll learn more about it from psychologist Christy Erdahl who recently helped discover placebo sleep.

How powerful is the placebo effect? After a good night’s sleep could a scientist convince you that you had tossed and turned, and if so, how would that affect your perceptions and behavior? What if a doctor told you that you had slept like a baby when in reality you had barely slept at all? Would hearing those words improve your performance on a difficult test?

In this episode we learn the answers to these questions and more as we explore how research continues to unravel the mysteries behind the placebo effect and how it can drastically alter our bodies and minds.

Our guest is Kristi Erdal, a psychologist at Colorado College who discovered placebo sleep along with one of her students, Christina Draganich. Draganich wondered if such a thing might exist after reading all the literature on placebos, and Erdal helped her create the research methods she used to test her hypothesis.

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