How To Trick Your Brain - The Placebo Effect

As a regular blogger on GymCube.com, I don't usually share my blogs from there on here. They're usually just fitness related, or about new features on GymCube, so I keep them to that side of things. 

This week though, I blogged about something really interesting, and felt it was worth sharing with you all. 

I watched an interesting programme on BBC 2 last week, about the placebo effect. 

If nothing else, I just love the word placebo. Something about it, the way it sounds, the way it's written. It's just a good word. 

But I also love what it does, or rather, what it means. That you can trick your brain, pretty easily, into thinking it's getting some medicine, or something which can alter it's state, when it's not getting anything like that at all. 

Take a fake paracetamol for a headache, and find out that your headache actually goes away. 

Take a pill which you're told will boost your performance in an event, only to find it's fake, but that you've just achieved your best ever time. 

Take a mood boosting supplement, feel the happiest you've been in ages, only to be told that the tablet you took had nothing in it. 

It's crazy how we can actually trick or cheat our brains. But that we also can't do it consciously. Someone has to lie to us about it, otherwise it doesn't work. 

It's like we're really smart, but then paradoxically, we're also really stupid. 

Our brains are just immense, and such a mystery. But at least they're interesting. Unchartered territory. Limitless possibilities.  

Read more about the placebo effect over on GymCube.