Thinking makes you smarter...

[Originally posted on blog 1.0 on 4 August 2007. Updated here with more sources...]
Time Magazine - http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html
NPR - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12487035&ft=1&f=5
and, Science Friday - http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Aug/hour2_080307.html

Okay, so just about everyone knows about the placebo effect. In fact it's even quantitatively accounted for in many double-blind studies on new pharmaceuticals and treatments. But until recently nobody has really studied the effect itself.
So these guys from Columbia, headed by Tor Wager, investigated the effect in the context of heat-stimulus generated pain. They gave people two cold creams and said one of them had lidocaine in it (even though it didn't...). They found that not only did the pain centers in the people's brains register less pain when they thought they had lidocaine (placebo effect), the brain also produced MORE ENDOGENOUS OPIOIDS. (These are the chemicals made by your brain to reduce pain: like endorphins, etc... very similar to morphine in their effects).
Conclusion: When you believe you are being treated for a particular problem, your brain rises to the occasion and helps out. Truly mind over matter...
So Bea tells me that medical anthropologists have known this for years (at least known that beliefs can have a strong effect on healing properties); this recent 'direct' proof, with direct biochemical evidence is just the icing on the cake. But why, then, have pharmacologists, medical doctors, and psychiatrists all ignored the human factor of "belief" for so long??? I found this news particularly interesting because many of you may know that my aunt works in care for the elderly, where she has always taken these issues into account... And (I'm sure) many people have called her crazy for doing so... I hope this data will eventually put those assertions to rest!