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Just dumb enough to work It’s called, “open label placebo,” and it seems to work by all reports. You take a sugar pill or other placebo, you know it is just a placebo, and yet sometimes, you still get some benefits. Here’s a short NPR segment when an author is interviewed about his experiences using …
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I’m superstitious about placebos I was chatting with Antony, (@AntonyTheReal_) about the show and the recent episodes about the placebo effect. He wondered if you could take a placebo, know it’s a placebo, and still get some benefit from doing so. It turns out that you can. It happens to be Antony’s birthday, and he …
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This is my lucky rabbit; I named him Placebo In episode 27 and episode 28, we had a look at the placebo effect and found that it can improve performance on both physical and mental activities. But how do you give yourself a placebo? Here’s one of many articles that referenced a 2010 study that …
As I said in the previous post, trying to figure out which object was which by tossing them wasn’t quite working out. Later that day, I had my assistant assist. He’d flip a coin, and then set one or the other of the two clay shapes in front of me, and I would say which …
My clay is setting. It’s a polymer clay, so first you squish it without mercy until it gets soft enough to work. Next you squish it carefully and oh so gently into the shape you want. Then you give it a while until it gets a bit harder. After that, you can toss it around …
In episode 13 of “The Lobby,” I interviewed Chris Marr, of The Content Marketing Academy. Recently, I caught an episode of his podcast. He was talking about the Rubik’s cube, and how he decided to give himself a challenge and learn to solve it. He asked for folk to share their own experiences with this …
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The amazing monkey manages to muster more memory than the miserable mind of man For certain tasks involving short term and working memory, our nearest relatives do better than we do. Check out this YouTube video to watch the chimps make us look like chumps. Chimp vs human! – Working Memory test
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a fun feathered fact Did you know that birds can be superstitious? No, really, I’m not making it up. In the episode, I said I’d provide one link, but I decided to give you two instead. Here’s a short YouTube video about the experiment. Pigeon Superstition Experiment And here’s an approximately 13-minute lecture on the …
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me think me smart me think smart In this episode, we examine the evidence for increased intelligence do to the placebo effect. This study found no placebo effect. In fact, expecting to do better caused people to do worse. Cognition and the Placebo Effect – Dissociating Subjective Perception and Actual Performance In this article, being …
During my interview with Arthur Benjamin, he spoke briefly about the joy of discovering something in mathematics, even if one is relatively certain that the given relationship has been known for years, or even centuries. Along the same lines, I’ve been playing with right triangles of late. They are called Pythagorean triples—three numbers, a, b, …