Nir Eyal “Why These £39 Placebo Pills Actually Work”

Summary

Nudge Podcast: Episode Summary
Guest: Nir Eyal | Host: Phill Agnew
Episode: “Why These £39 Placebo Pills Actually Work”
Date: April 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Phill Agnew is joined by renowned author Nir Eyal to explore the surprising power of belief and the science behind placebos. Drawing from Eyal’s new book, Beyond Belief, the episode investigates how the mind can fundamentally shape our experiences—relieving pain, enhancing performance, even changing our perception of reality—all through belief and expectation. The discussion moves from classic psychological studies to jaw-dropping real-world examples, revealing how something as innocuous as a £39 placebo pill can actually produce measurable effects.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Belief: The Rat Experiment

• Study Reference: Kurt Richter, 1950s
  • Wild rats could swim for about 15 minutes before giving up.
  • When rescued and returned to water, rats swam for up to 60 hours.
  • Insight: “Something in their brains had changed. Suddenly there was… this reason for hope that kept them persistent and swimming 240 times longer.” – Nir Eyal [04:29]
  • Takeaway: The expectation of rescue (belief) massively increased perseverance.

2. Placebo Effect: Mind Over Matter

• Foundational Study: Tor Wagner’s Analgesic Cream Experiment [06:08]

  • Participants experienced real pain relief from a fake cream, confirmed by brain scans.
  • Quote: “We could see in their brains that their pain… was somehow getting in the way of that pain response. So the pain, critically, wasn’t becoming suffering.” – Nir Eyal [07:02]
  • Mechanism: Awareness and expectation produce real changes in the brain’s pain signals.

• Asthma Placebo Study:

  • Subjective feelings of improvement matched real medication, but only true medication improved lung function [08:00].
  • Distinction: “Pain is produced in the brain and it can be affected by placebos, whereas sickness is present in the body and will always require medical intervention.” – Phill Agnew [08:55]

3. Sickness vs. Illness, Pain vs. Suffering

• Illness = Mind, Sickness = Body: [09:07]

  • Many chronic symptoms (e.g., fibromyalgia, migraines) respond to placebos.
  • Stat: Around 80% of healthcare spending goes to “illness” (symptoms, experience), not “sickness” (underlying bodily cause).

• Key Point: “All pain is real. Nobody’s making up pain. It’s all real. However, all pain is also in the brain. Where else could it be?” – Nir Eyal [09:42]

4. Placebo in Daily Life & Marketing

• Branded vs. Generic Pills:
  • People report more relief from pricey, branded pills even when active ingredients are identical [10:38].
• Coffee Placebo: [11:00]
  • Belief in caffeine made decaf drinkers more alert and physiologically “stimulated.”
• Golf Equipment: [11:40]
  • Playing with a “pro’s putter” made subjects perform better, simply via belief.
• Open-label Placebos: [11:58]
  • Tad Kapchuk’s IBS study found even when patients knew a pill was fake, it still relieved symptoms as much as prescription meds.
  • Quote: “We always think that placebos have to be about deception… Not true. All you have to believe in… is that placebos work.” – Nir Eyal [12:01]

Notable Moment

• Placebo Pills for Sale: [13:09–13:39]
  • “If you go on Amazon right now and you type in placebo pills, you will see them sold under several different brands… and you’ll see five star reviews.” – Nir Eyal

5. Amplifying the Placebo: Details Matter

• Form Matters: [15:04]
  • Larger pills, capsules, injections, and even coloring (e.g., red = more energizing) impact placebo effectiveness.
  • “Red and orange pills… work better as stimulants, while blue and green pills seem to work better as sedatives.” – Phill Agnew [15:28]

6. Belief & Performance: Sleep, Sports, Strength, Cognition

• Sleep Perception Study: [15:52–16:21]
  • Telling people they slept well made them perform better, regardless of actual sleep quality.
• Serena Williams – Wimbledon 2015 Story: [18:10]
  • Her coach lied about her performance stats (“You make 80% of the points at the net.”), boosting her confidence and ultimately her results.
  • “She ended up getting exactly 80% of the points at the net and she ended up winning Wimbledon that year.” – Nir Eyal [19:01]
• Steroid Placebo Study (1972, Massachusetts Gym): [19:40–21:40]
  • Men told they were given steroids (actually a placebo) saw significant strength and muscle gains.
  • Bench press increased by 29lbs in one month.
  • Quote: “It is true that placebos can change our bodies… by first changing our behavior.” – Nir Eyal [21:35]
• Cognitive Placebos: [22:01–22:19]
  • Smelling a “cognitive enhancing scent” or thinking a (fake) electric current was stimulating their brains led to real measurable improvements on mental tests.

7. The Nocebo Effect: Belief Can Harm

• Story of Mr. A: [23:14–24:55]
  • Man overdosed on inert placebo pills, experienced dangerous symptoms purely from belief (“nocebo” effect).
  • Recovered immediately after learning the truth.
  • Quote: “His blood pressure and heart rate are back to normal. He’s fully revived, and he walks out of the hospital, perhaps a little embarrassed.” – Nir Eyal

8. Marketing as Placebo Inception

• Wine fMRI Study: [25:10–27:14]
  • The same wine tastes better if labeled “expensive.” Brain scans reveal stronger reward responses.
  • Insight: Advertising “incepts” the experience, influencing anticipation and, thus, subjective reality.
  • Quote: “You are creating a belief that creates an anticipatory response that actually affects the feeling.” – Nir Eyal [25:30]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Placebos:
  “If it’s not that expensive and it doesn’t have any side effects, go for it.” – Nir Eyal [14:14]
• On Advertising:
  “The role of advertising, turns out, is to incept the experience. It’s not just about increasing awareness.” – Nir Eyal [25:15]
• On Expectation:
  “These expectations literally shape how we experience the product, that it shapes the actual experience itself based on what we anticipate.” – Nir Eyal [27:00]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–02:30: Introduction & the missing ingredient: belief
• 02:38–05:09: The rat swimming experiment and the transformative impact of hope
• 06:08–07:26: fMRI pain studies and the brain’s own “pharmacy”
• 08:00–09:07: Asthma placebo and the pain/illness distinction
• 10:38–11:40: Brands, caffeine, and putter performance; the placebo in everyday life
• 11:58–13:39: Open-label placebos; £39 placebo pills on Amazon
• 15:04–16:21: Placebo design—color, size, frequency; sleep perception’s impact on cognition
• 18:10–19:14: Serena Williams and the placebo of performance stats
• 19:24–21:40: Placebo steroids and actual strength gains
• 22:01–23:13: Placebo for cognition—scent and “brain stimulation”
• 23:14–24:55: The nocebo effect: overdosing on placebos
• 25:10–27:14: Marketing as experience inception—the wine pricing study

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Episode Takeaways

• Placebos aren’t just fake medicine for gullible people: belief itself—when it’s in play—can produce measurable, sometimes dramatic, changes in mind and body.
• Placebo effects can be enhanced by details such as pill appearance and branding; open acknowledgment of the placebo doesn’t necessarily lessen effectiveness.
• Marketers and advertisers leverage this psychological principle, crafting narratives and expectations that directly shape consumer experience.
• The power of belief is substantiated across domains—from pain relief to sports to cognitive tasks, even sleep and strength gains.
• Both positive (placebo) and negative (nocebo) expectations can create very real changes in how we feel, act, and perform.

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For further exploration of placebo and belief—including stories of hypno-sedation, chronic pain reversal, and faith as a placebo—listen to the bonus episode mentioned in the show notes.

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Original language, insights, and engaging examples preserved in keeping with Phill Agnew and Nir Eyal’s compelling style.

Transcript

[A]

So Kurt richter in the 1950s, he's a biologist and he has a very simple question. The question is, how long can a wild rat swim?

[B]

It is a strange question, but it's an important question. A question that surprisingly reveals a lot about the power of belief and the impact of placebo. Today on Nudge, I'm very excited to be joined by someone who has studied the power of belief for his latest book.

[A]

My name is Nir Eyal and I'm the author of three books. The first book was called Hooked, second book was called Indistractible and now just released is called Beyond Belief, which is a book book that dives into how our beliefs shape our perception of reality, changing what we can see, what we can feel and what we do.

[B]

All of that coming up in today's episode of Nudge. When someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot A E O is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello and welcome. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. I'm very happy to be joined today by Nir Eyal. I recorded my first episode with him on Nudge way back in 2019. Back then his book, back then it was about his brilliant book, indistractable. But since then, he studied motivation deeply and he realized something was missing.

[A]

I thought motivation was like a straight line, kind of the classic economic version of if I, if I want this, if I want this benefit, I do this behavior. Very simple. But clearly something's missing then. If it was as easy as just knowing what you want and how to do it, we'd all have six packs and be multimillionaires. There's something missing. What's missing is belief that if you think about it, you know, if, if you work for a boss who you don't believe has your best interest at heart, maybe you don't believe they're going to give you that raise or that promotion. How motivated will you be to sustain your doing your best work for them if you don't believe in them? Not very. So even if you want the benefit, if you don't believe you're going to get it, then you risk adjusted and you don't work as hard.

[B]

What's missing is belief. Now this borders on sounding slightly fantastical. So I asked Nia for some evidence that belief can really change our behavior. He told me about a study with rats.

[A]

So Kurt richter in the 1950s, he's a biologist and he has a very simple question. The question is, how long can a wild rat swim? That was an interesting question back in the 1950s. I don't know if it's fascinating to you, but that, that was Richter's question. Turns out 15 minutes. A wild stressed rat can swim for about 15 minutes before it seems to give up and dies. Now Richter wanted to see what would happen if he tried to increase that span of time. So here's what he did. He took a new group of rats, he put them in the same experiment, cylinders of water, and he let them start swimming for, for their lives. Now at about the 15 minute mark, when he knew they were about to give up, he saw them starting to struggle. He reached his hand in, he pulled out the rat, dried the rat off, let it catch its breath and then plunk back into the cylinder it went. He did this a few times to condition the rat, to expect that salvation might be possible. That if the rat persisted, it might get saved. Now the question I oftentimes ask audiences that don't haven't read the book yet. I say okay, 15 minutes was the base condition, the starting condition. How much longer did Richter increase the rat's survival time? How much longer would the rat persist for after this intervention? People guess twice as long, three times as long. Sometimes somebody will be very ambitious. Actually I gave a talk just the other day and somebody said an hour and the room laughed. People in the room said no way, an hour. I mean think about that. It is comical. But here's the thing. The rats didn't go from 15 minutes to 50 to 60 minutes. They weren't 4 times more persistent. They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours. Not 60 minutes, 60 hours of non stop swimming. What changed? What happened? Same rat bodies, same environment, same exact experiment. Something in their brains had changed. Suddenly there was this opportunity, there was this, this reason for hope that kept them persistent and swimming 240 times longer. So the, the takeaway here is where are we stopping at 15 minutes? Where do we give up? Because we can't, we think, we can't persist that we, we think, well that's just all I'm able to do. No, you you what you do is what you believe you can do that we all in fact have this unlocked potential, just like the rats were unlocked through this intervention. The 60 hours was always within them. Something was unlocked in them. We also have all kinds of powers, persistence powers that we don't know we actually have.

[B]

Richer writes that wild rats, once conditioned, swam just as long as domestic rats or longer. In this way, he wrote, the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless. Thereafter, they again become aggressive, try to escape and show no signs of giving up. What changed? Well, Nir says the rescued rats had learnt a vital lesson. Persistence can lead to salvation. Escape will lead was possible. That belief gave them a reason to keep swimming. Now Nir's book goes on to talk about all the ways that belief can alter behavior. But I want us to focus for this episode on one specific subsection of belief because I believe it's really important to everyone listening it is the placebo. Placebos, as we know, are fake treatments that work not because of their medicinal properties, but simply because the receiver believes the treatment will work. It's a hard concept to get your head around. So to help understand it, I asked Nir to share some evidence backed studies on the placebo effect.

[A]

One One study from Tor Wagner found that when he had participants had them inflicted with with a heat source on their arm and they rated that heat source while they were in an FMRI machine so that we could track blood flow in the brain. What he saw was that he could see this, the pain center of their brain become more active when they experience the heat. But then when he came to them and said now I'm going to give you an analgesic cream, okay? This is an analgesic cream, it will reduce your pain. And he put on that cream on their arm. It's not only that people reported that their pain decreased about by half. They went from 8 out of 10 on the on the pain scale to about a 4 out of 10 in the study on average. Not only did they say their pain was reduced when they got this analgesic cream, but in fact we could see in their brains that their pain, a prefrontal cortex became more active and seemed to inhibit that pain response. The pain response was still processing in the brain, but the pfc, the prefrontal cortex was somehow getting in the way of that pain response. So the pain critically wasn't becoming suffering. That's really the power of the placebo effect because what I didn't tell you was this magical analgesic cream was a bunch of vanishing cream that he had bought at the bookstore, the school bookstore, that it was just moisturizing cream, nothing analgesic whatsoever about it. It was completely a placebo.

[B]

Dozens of participants in Wagner's study, the same pattern emerged. Believing in the effects of the analgesic cream reduced both the reported pain and brain activity in the pain processing regions by roughly 25%. This effect was not due to any change in the skin level. The brain itself interpreted the pain differently. Nir writes how the landmark study published in Science, provided evidence that expectations can alter how the brain processes pain. As Wagner would go on to explain, the brain has its own internal pharmacy. In other words, the mere belief that you're receiving an effective treatment can cause your brain to release natural painkillers. There are plenty of studies like this one published in the New England Journal of Medicine shares how researchers assigned asthma patients to one of four interventions. An albuterol inhaler, which is an effective medication that really does work. A placebo inhaler, a placebo acupuncture, and then no treatment at all. When the patients rated their own improvement, the real medication and the placebo interventions, the acupuncture and the inhaler produced nearly identical subjective benefits. Patients felt significantly better with all three treatments compared to the control. But when the researchers objectively measured the patient's lung function, they found something very different. Only the real inhaler produced actual improvements in breathing capacity. Neil went on to make the point that pain is different from sickness. Pain is produced in the brain and it can be affected by placebos, whereas sickness is present in the body and will always require medical intervention.

[A]

And it's important to separate two things that I think are going to sound synonymous to most people, but certainly aren't, which is the difference between pain and suffering. I always thought those two same things. Things pretty much turns out that's not true. Also, sickness is not illness. These are two separate things. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. And so what this means is when we look at people who are suffering from chronic pain, that in fact, chronic pain is defined as pain without any known physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So when we talk about fibromyalgia, when we talk about chronic headaches, when we talk about insomnia, when we talk about even depression, anxiety, even irritable bowel syndrome, so many of these maladies, these illnesses turns out, are highly responsive to the placebo effect, so much so that we know that about 80%, 80% of our healthcare spending is towards illness. Not sickness. Only 20% is healing physical maladies of the body. 80% is spent on healing the symptoms of those maladies. Right. The illness is in the. Is in the mind. Now, what I don't want people to think is that I'm saying that pain isn't real. That's not what I'm saying. All pain is real. Let me repeat this. All pain is real. Nobody's making up pain. It's all real. However, all pain is also in the brain. Where else could it be? Pain isn't in your shoulder or in your back. No. All pain is registered as signal. It's interpreted this signal, this information is interpreted as suffering.

[B]

Pain is something that is produced in the brain, which means a placebo can help lessen the effect of that pain. One study from the 1980s gave participants suffering from headaches either branded pain relief pills or generic pain relief pills. The pills were the same, had the exact same medicinal properties, but patients who took the expensive branded pill felt better simply because they expected to. Near writes how this phenomenon extends to other domains. Participants in a coffee study were told they were either drinking caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. In reality, both groups only received decaf. Yet those who believed they were consuming caffeine reported feeling more alert and even performed better on attention tasks than those who were correctly told they were drinking decaf. The four researchers in this 2011 study found that the decaf placebo even led to an increased heart rate and higher blood pressure, which resembles the actual effects of caffeine. In another 2011 study, researchers found that when golfers believed they were using a professional player's putter versus an ordinary putter, they performed significantly better, requiring fewer strokes on the green. Simply believing they had better equipment made them play better. And near went on to tell me something fascinating. Placebos are so powerful that even knowing you're taking one can still make you feel better.

[A]

This really blew my mind. We always think that placebos have to be about deception, that you have to believe that it's a real medicine in order for it to work. Not true. All you have to believe in, it turns out, is that placebos work. And here's how we know this. So Tad Kapchuk at Stanford ran a study with patients of irritable bowel syndrome, and he gave them a bottle that said, in clear letters, placebo written on the side of the bottle. He told them, this is a placebo. It is an inert substance with no medical ingredients. However, some people have been found to benefit by taking placebos they ran this study. Turns out the placebo medication that they gave people was as effective as the leading pain medicine for ibs.

[B]

After three weeks, the open label placebo group reported significantly greater improvement in the IBS symptoms than the no treatment group. The magnitude of the improvement was comparable to the effects of powerful IBS medications as seen in other clinical trials. Kapchuk said, we were stunned. We had hoped it would work, but the size of the effect was far larger than we expected.

[A]

The crazy part is that even after the study, Dr. Kapchuk had some of the participants in the study call him and say, Dr. Kapchuk, can I please get some of those amazing placebo pills? They were so effective and believe it or not, if you go on Amazon right now and you type in placebo pills, you will see them sold under several different brands. These placebo pills that say placebo right on the jar and, and you'll see five star reviews where people are talking about fast acting relief that they're getting from these completely inert substances.

[B]

I googled this and I discovered the hilariously named Fuck it all pill that is spelt F U K I T O L. The fuck it all pill is named kind of hilariously for reasons you'll pretty much quickly understand. Because it is a placebo pill. It is made of microcrystalline cellulose, which is fully inert, meaning it passes through the body with zero interactions on the package. It says it is a pure and honest placebo. It costs 39 pounds to buy a pack of these and yet people do buy it. A couple of dozen have even given it five star reviews.

[A]

I used to make fun of my wife's family. My wife's family is Chinese and I would make fun of them for traditional Chinese medicine. And I would say, ah, you know what, this is no better than a placebo. And then I looked at the results and the placebo effects are crazy effective. They make people feel better. And so I don't make fun of that anymore. If it's not that expensive and it doesn't have any side effects, go for it. You know, for example, for me, you know, I travel a lot and I constantly struggled with jet lag. Well, it turns out that there's some research that shows that creatine can improve modestly cognitive performance. So now I take a few grams of, of creatine, which is very well studied, has no side effects that I know of. Very inexpensive, I can carry it around with me on my bag. Does it actually make a physiological difference I don't know, I don't care because for me it makes me feel better.

[B]

Neir writes in his book how his creatine pills could be even more effective. He writes how larger pills produce stronger effects than smaller ones and capsules tend to outperform tablets. Injections produce even stronger responses than pills. Research shows that two placebo pills work better than one and and taking them at multiple points during a day can amplify the effects. Red and orange pills seem to work better as stimulants, while blue and green pills seem to work better as sedatives. White pills are perceived as safer, but less potent and bitter tasting liquids are perceived as more medicinal and often produce more potent effects than sweet tasting liquids. Which is of course why Red Bull's medicinal taste makes us snap out of our sleepy state. And speaking of sleep, we know that,

[A]

for example, for sleep, when we put people in a sleep lab and they have a perfectly good night of sleep, but we tell them you had a terrible night's sleep, their performance decreases. Their cognitive performance because they thought they had a bad night's sleep gets worse. Conversely, even when they wake people up in a sleep lab so that they ensure they have bad sleep and then when they get up the next day they tell them they had a great night's sleep, turns out they're fine the rest of the day. Even on objective cognitive tests.

[B]

This 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology gave participants false feedback about the quality of their sleep. Some were told they had experienced above average REM sleep quality, while others were simply told their sleep quality was below average. All of these findings were based on fake EEG readings. There was no actual differences in their sleep. However, those who were told they had superior sleep subsequently performed better on cognitive tests of addition and word association than those who were simply told their sleep quality was poor. Placebos really do work. They are powerful enough to change how your brain processes pain, how well you sleep, and even how long you can keep going when everything else feels hopeless. And the most surprising part is you don't even need to be tricked for the placebo to work. But Neil wasn't done. He went on to tell me that placebos can increase muscle growth, they can make you smarter, and even how a placebo helped Serena Williams win Wimbledon in 2015. All of that coming up after the break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today after you listen to Nudge is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings and is brought to you, of course, by the HubSpot Podcast Network the audio destination for business professionals. Listen and you will hear Sarah ask the hard questions and uncover these triumphs, failures and lessons from the top business leaders. Also, you can make your own billion dollar moves in venture, business and life. It's a wonderful podcast, so go and listen to Billion dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. Back in 2015, the 20 time Grand Slam tennis winner was struggling.

[A]

So Serena Williams was competing in Wimbledon and she was not doing well at all. The problem was she was afraid that she wasn't able to rush the net. And you know, in tennis, every millisecond counts. And so because she wasn't rushing the net, she was losing points and she was doing very poorly. Now her coach, Patrick Montaglu goes to her and says, Serena, listen, I was looking at the statistics and it turns out that when you rush the net, you make 80% of the points. Every 80% of the time that you rush the net, you make a point. Oh my gosh. He says, really? I had no idea. I thought I sucked at the net. Well, he says, look, the statistics don't lie. This is the best news of the day. And it's true. Statistics don't lie. But he did, because that was nowhere near true. She wasn't making anywhere near 80% of the points at the net. Not even close. But here's what happened. Her coach knew what she was capable of accomplishing and by telling her that lie, he was unlocking what was already within her. You know, the end of the story is that she ended up getting exactly 80% of the points at the net and she ended up winning Wimbledon that year.

[B]

Now, Serena Williams's story is just one example. But this pattern, that belief shapes behavior, behavior shapes outcomes. It shows up time and time again in the research.

[A]

So here's what happened. They took two groups of men and they told them that they are enrolling them in a steroid study.

[B]

This was back in 1972 at a Massachusetts gym. I should mention that the sample size is very small, just 15 young men. But given how well it supports everything we've heard today, I think it is still worth sharing.

[A]

And one group, they gave nothing to, they just said, go ahead and go work out. You're the control group. No, no pills will be given to you, no steroids for you. Just do your, your workout protocol. The other group, they said, congratulations, you will be taking this brand new steroid pill and we want to see how it affects your performance. Of course, it was just a placebo. There was nothing in the steroid that quote, unquote steroid that could have generated muscle growth. And yet in the group that received the placebo steroid, they recorded that these men in the study got substantially stronger. And this isn't one of those rare, you know, these studies, unfortunately, have become ubiquitous. That doesn't replicate. This has been replicated time and time again. And in this study, what they found was that these men gained more muscle mass and strength across a range of

[B]

weight lifting exercises, bench press, squats, and overhead lifts. These men in the placebo group improved far more than a control group who received nothing. Their bench press alone went up by an impressive 29 pounds a month. That's 29 pounds of additional weight in that bench press.

[A]

Now why? One of the biggest misconceptions around placebos is that placebos have some kind of magical healing, growing power on your body. And that's just not true. Placebos do not work for sickness. Remember, sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. So how did these men get stronger? It wasn't because the placebo somehow changed their bodily mitochondria or something has nothing to do with that. What happened was that when these men received the placebo steroid, they worked harder because they expected the placebo steroid. They expected the steroid that they were taking, which was just a placebo, to make them stronger. So they push through a couple more reps, they put on a little bit more weight. And so it is true that placebos can change our bodies, that our beliefs can in fact become our biology, but not the way most people think. That beliefs change our biology by first changing our behavior.

[B]

They trained harder, they put in more reps, they used heavier weights and made a greater effort. Believing they had a chemical edge made them expect to succeed. And that expectation changed how they behaved at the gym. They simply pushed more than the others. This doesn't just work for our physical performance, it can work for cognition as well.

[A]

Not only were those sleep studies that found that you can improve cognition by telling people they had a good night's sleep, there was a study that found that giving people a certain scent and telling them that this is a cognitive enhancing potion also improve their performance on objective metrics of mental focus and acuity.

[B]

In this 2017 study, participants were asked to smell a neutral substance. Half who smelt the substance were told nothing. The other half were told that it was a creativity boosting scent. That group went on to score significantly higher on creative thinking tests, even though they'd smelt the exact same scent as everyone else. A similar thing happened in Another experiment where participants were told they were receiving a mild electric current to their brain that would sharpen their thinking, so no current was actually applied. And yet that group was both faster and more accurate than those who were told nothing, simply because they expected to perform better. Study after study reveals how placebos can have real physiological effects on our bodies and cognitive effects on our minds. Which leads us to the genuinely incredible story of Mr. A, the man who overdosed on placebo pills.

[A]

Not only is there the placebo effect, there's also the nocebo effect. So placebo means I will please, I will heal. Nocebo effect is the opposite. I will harm. In this. In this case study, this was in the medical literature. Mr. A was anonymized. And here's what. Here's why. Mr. A had a very bad breakup with his girlfriend. And one day he decided that he wanted to commit suicide. And so what he did, he took an entire bottle of antidepressants. Just took the whole bottle. The moment he swallowed all these pills, he realized that he wanted to live after all. And so he ran to his neighbor's house, he told them what had happened, and they rushed him to the emergency room. As soon as he gets to the emergency room, he collapses on the floor. The bottles spill out. The pill bottle is still in his hand, and he tells the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. They rush him into the operating room to figure out what to do about this overdose. His blood pressure, importantly, his blood pressure is falling, his heart rate is dangerously low, and he's slipping in and out of consciousness. They try and figure out what was this antidepressant that he had overdosed on. And so they look on the pill bottle, and it doesn't say the name of the antidepressant. It says a phone number. They call this phone number, and it turns out that Mr. A was part of a clinical trial and he was in the control group. So he had ingested an entire bottle full of placebos, completely inert. There was no way they could have caused the decreasing blood pressure and heart rate. And the passing in and out of consciousness could not have been because of the placebos. They tell Mr. A this, and within 15 minutes, his blood pressure and heart rate are back to normal. He's fully revived, and he walks out of the hospital, perhaps a little embarrassed.

[B]

Mr. A's body responded not to what was real, but to what he believed was real. Belief is powerful enough to collapse a man and then revive him. It sounds surprising, but it's probably Something marketers have known about for, for a long, long time.

[A]

I really didn't appreciate the role of advertising in marketing. I, I think I misunderstood. I think like most people, I thought that advertising is about spreading the message of, of your brand. You know, come, please try my product. That's not the role of advertising in marketing. The role of advertising, turns out, is to incept the experience. It's not just about increasing awareness. It's that you are creating a belief that creates an anticipatory response that actually affects the feeling. Great example of this is that wine study. They took people and they put them in an FMR machine so they could track blood flow in the brain. And they gave them first a cheap bottle of wine. They had a little tube in their mouth as they were in this FMR machine, and they gave them a little sip of cheap wine. They said, this is a $5 bottle of wine. What do you think of it? And they said, you know, it's a little flat on the finish. It's a little harsh. I'm not a big fan of this particular wine. And they said, okay, now, you know, they gave them some water so they could clean their mouth out. And he said, okay, now we're going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine. Chateau d' et something something. This is a very, very expensive fine wine. Please tell us what you think of it. People said, oh, my goodness. Wow, this wine is so smooth and I can taste hints of oak and berry. And you know, all this stuff that wine snobs say, of course it was the same wine. And here's what's fascinating. Not only did people say that the more expensive wine tasted better, that confirmatory part of, of the expectation loop. Not only did they say it better, they weren't lying. How do we know when they're not lying? Because we could actually see in their brains that in this FMRI machine. And there's, there's questions. Caveat here. You know, the FMRI is not in a super exact science. I know. However, it seems to be that there's indications that the reward centers of their brain became more active with the more expensive bottle of wine, indicating that perhaps they actually experience the wine differently when they believed it was from an expensive bottle. So it's not that we're lying, it's that these expectations literally shape how we experience the product, that it shapes the actual experience itself based on what we anticipate.

[B]

Branded pills outperform identical generic ones at curing headaches. Golfers sink more putts when they believe they're using a prose putter. Believing you slept well will make you perform better on cognitive tests, even if you slept awfully. And gym goers who thought they were on steroids added 29 pounds to their bench press in just a month. But that's not all. Nir had several more insights, including one incredible story.

[A]

And Daniel comes across this technique called hypno sedation and he learns to do this quite effectively. And by the time his operation day comes, he is able to sustain a 55 minute procedure where scalpel is cutting into flesh, where metal is wrenched from bone, and during this entire procedure he has no general anesthesia, no local anesthesia, no sedation of any kind other than the power of his brain.

[B]

That story plus how a man named Simon overcame his chronic pain, how near changed his perception of his ADHD diagnosis, and how faith can act as a placebo well, all of those great bits of content are available in today's bonus episode. Accessing the free bonus episode is simple to get access to listen right away, just click the first link you'll see in the show notes, pop in your email address and you'll get taken straight to the episode. It's made exactly like this episode. Fully researched, fully sighted. And if you're already a Nudge Nick newsletter subscriber, you don't need to do any of that. You just click the link in the PS of today's email and you can listen right now. For everyone else, just click the link in the show notes, enter your email and you can listen right after this. That's all from me today folks. Thank you so much for listening and thanks to Nir for coming on. His book Beyond Belief is great. If you've enjoyed today's episode, you'll love his book. You can find a link to pick it up in the show notes. And if you need something to listen to after this, please do go check out the bonus episode. I'm really proud of it. Sometimes my bonus episodes are a bit short, but this one is more like a full nudge episode, so I really hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. I've been your host, Villagnew, and I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge.

[A]

Cheers.