The placebo is “unlocking your brain’s own pharmacy”
An interesting interview with Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer by Krista Tippett.
What is the ideal drug? The placebo. It doesn’t introduce any foreign substances into your body. It has wide-ranging power to cure all sorts of ills. No known side effects. But the whole edifice of clinical trials is built on identifying and ignoring the placebo effect, as if it’s somehow “fake.” It’s not fake at all.
A few other thoughts:
1. I love the simplicity of her approach. She defines mindfulness as “the simple process of actively noticing new things.” That’s easy for me to understand. There are lots of tasks that I do that are completely mindlessly — at work, at home, at play — and I definitely feel more engaged when I am in a mindful state, as she defines it.
2. She claims that you can do meditation mindlessly. And she defines the goal of meditation as “post-meditative mindfulness.”
3. An ongoing theme of this blog is the impossibility of knowing. So I really liked this quote: “Universal uncertainty is an awareness:’I don’t know, you don’t know, in some sense we really can’t know.’”
4. How much of science is conducted mindfully?