Michelle: A 2005 NIH study found that prescription sleeping pills give you, on average, only about ten extra minutes of sleep compared to a simple sugar pill. Mark: Ten minutes? That’s it? I’ve spent more time than that just trying to open the childproof cap. What accounts for the rest of the effect, then? Michelle: Exactly. The rest is the story you tell yourself. And what if that story is the most powerful, and misunderstood, drug on Earth? Mark: That’s a wild thought. It feels like we’re on the edge of a major scientific mystery. Michelle: We are. And today we’re diving headfirst into it with the book Suggestible You: The Curious Science of How Your Brain Tricks, Persuades, and Sometimes Heals You by Erik Vance. Mark: I’ve heard this one is fascinating. It’s got incredibly high ratings from readers, who seem to love how it demystifies these weird brain phenomena. Michelle: It really does. And what makes this book so compelling is that the author, Erik Vance, a science journalist with a background in biology, didn't just report this from a distance. He had himself poked, prodded, burned, electrocuted, hypnotized, and even cursed by a witchdoctor to understand it firsthand. Mark: Cursed by a witchdoctor? Okay, we have to start there. What on earth drives a science journalist to do that? Michelle: It all goes back to his childhood. His entire life has been a tug-of-war between faith and science, and that tension is the perfect entry point for understanding the power of suggestion.

Michelle: Vance grew up in a Christian Science household. The core belief is that God created everyone perfectly, and any illness is just an error in thought that can be corrected with prayer. For them, medicine wasn't just unnecessary; it was a distraction from true spiritual healing. Mark: That’s a heavy belief system to place on a kid. I imagine that would be tested pretty quickly. Michelle: It was. In 1978, when Vance was just a toddler, he came down with what his parents feared was Legionnaires' disease, which was all over the news. He was getting sicker and sicker. His parents prayed, they called a Christian Science practitioner for support, but nothing was working. His mother, Dee, was at her breaking point. Mark: I can’t even imagine that kind of desperation. Your child is sick, and your entire worldview is telling you not to do the one thing everyone else would do: go to a doctor. Michelle: Exactly. She finally called the practitioner one last time, in tears, and basically said, "I don’t know if this religion works or not—but it damn well better work now! I’m losing my son!" Mark: Wow. What did the practitioner say? Michelle: Something that completely shifted her perspective. He said, "It doesn’t matter whether this religion works or not. God loves your child." And in that moment, Dee let go of her doubt. She felt this wave of peace and love. And when she went back to check on her son… his fever had broken. He was recovering. Miraculously. Mark: That’s an incredible story. It’s the kind of thing that would cement your faith forever. Michelle: It did for his parents. But for Vance, the story got more complicated. At age 18, he was a thrill-seeking rock climber, rebelling against his upbringing. He and his friends were climbing a spire in Yosemite when a massive thunderstorm rolled in, trapping them on the exposed rock face with lightning striking all around. He was terrified. He tried to pray, but he felt nothing. No divine presence, no sense of peace. Just cold, hard reality. He realized his survival was entirely in his own hands. As he later wrote, "On that day, absence of evidence was evidence of absence." Mark: So he had this profound faith-based healing as a child, and then a profound experience of faith being absent when he needed it most. That’s a powerful contradiction to live with. Michelle: It’s the contradiction that fuels the whole book. He wanted to find a scientific explanation for these powerful experiences. And that leads us directly to the placebo effect. Mark: Okay, but hold on. Isn't the placebo effect just for, you know, gullible people? The whole "it's all in your head" thing? Michelle: That’s the common misconception, but the science shows something much more profound. It’s not just in your head; it’s in your brain chemistry. Vance actually participated in an experiment with a researcher named Luana Colloca to feel it himself. They hooked him up to an electrode and told him a green light meant a weak shock and a red light meant a strong one. Mark: Let me guess, the lights were a lie? Michelle: A total lie. In the final round, both the red and green light shocks were the exact same intensity. But when the green light was on, Vance reported feeling significantly less pain. The expectation of a weaker shock literally caused his brain to release its own natural painkillers—endorphins—and turn down the pain signals. It was a real, measurable, physiological event. Mark: So his brain became its own pharmacist, dispensing a painkiller just because it expected one. That’s amazing. Michelle: It is. But this pharmacist can also dispense poison. That’s the nocebo effect—the placebo’s evil twin. If you expect a negative outcome, your brain can create it. In drug trials, people given a simple sugar pill will often report side effects like headaches, nausea, and fatigue, just because they were warned it was a possibility. Their negative expectation literally makes them sick. Mark: This is where some critics of this field get nervous, isn't it? The idea that focusing on the power of belief could be used to legitimize all sorts of pseudoscience and unproven treatments. Michelle: That’s a very real concern, and Vance addresses it. He’s not arguing that we should replace medicine with sugar pills. He’s arguing that we need to understand the powerful mechanism of belief itself. The story, the ritual, the trust in the healer—these things aren't just fluff. They are active ingredients in any treatment. And that brings us to the theater of medicine.

Mark: The 'theater of medicine.' I like that. It suggests there’s a performance involved. Michelle: A huge performance. And to understand it, Vance takes us back to 18th-century Paris and introduces one of history's greatest medical showmen: Franz Mesmer. Mark: Oh, I know this guy! The origin of the word 'mesmerized,' right? Wasn't he basically a con artist? Michelle: By our standards, absolutely. His science was complete nonsense. He believed in something called "animal magnetism," an invisible fluid that connected everything in the universe. He claimed he could manipulate this fluid to cure people. His treatment sessions were pure theater. Mark: Paint the scene for me. Michelle: Picture a lavish Parisian salon. The lights are low, strange music from a glass harmonica fills the air. In the center of the room is a large cauldron filled with "magnetized" water and iron filings. Patients would hold onto iron rods coming out of the cauldron, and Mesmer, dressed in a dramatic silk robe, would walk around, staring intensely into their eyes, making passes with his hands. People would go into convulsions, they’d cry, they’d laugh, and many would walk away claiming to be cured of all sorts of ailments. Mark: It sounds completely bonkers. How did anyone fall for that? He was a fraud, plain and simple. Michelle: His theory was a fraud, yes. But the effects were, in many cases, real. It got so popular that King Louis XVI commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to investigate him. And this was an all-star team: it included Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, Dr. Guillotin, of guillotine fame, and the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin. Mark: So a team of the greatest scientific minds of the era. What did they find? Michelle: They conducted one of the first blind trials in history. They had Mesmer "magnetize" one tree in an orchard, and then had a patient hug trees until he found the right one. He hugged a non-magnetized tree and immediately went into convulsions, declaring it was the one. They concluded that animal magnetism didn't exist. But—and this is the crucial part—they said the effects were caused by "imagination." They wrote, "In medicine, faith saves." Mark: So even back then, they recognized that belief itself was the active ingredient. Michelle: Precisely. Mesmer, without knowing it, was a master of the placebo. The elaborate ritual, his air of authority, the collective excitement of the group—it was all part of the 'theater' that created a powerful expectation of healing. And we see this today. The doctor's white coat, the sterile office, the complicated-sounding medical terms—they're all props in the modern theater of medicine, designed to build our confidence and amplify the effect of the treatment. Mark: It’s like branding. I’m thinking of that famous experiment where people prefer Pepsi in a blind taste test, but when they see the iconic red Coke can, their brain's pleasure centers light up and they say Coke tastes better. The story of Coke is more powerful than the liquid itself. Michelle: That's a perfect analogy. The book even mentions how a cheap wine, Two-Buck Chuck, won a prestigious gold medal in a blind tasting against expensive vintages. The judges were horrified when they found out. The expectation set by a fancy label or a high price tag literally changes our perception of reality. Mark: So our brains are constantly being influenced by these external stories and performances. But what about the stories we tell ourselves? Our own memories? Michelle: Ah, now you're getting to the most unsettling part of the book. Because if the stories others tell us can change our bodies, the stories we tell ourselves can change our past.

Michelle: The book argues that memory is not a video recording. It’s a reconstruction. Every time you recall a memory, you’re not playing it back; you’re rebuilding it, and it can be contaminated in the process. Mark: That’s a deeply unsettling idea. Our memories are the foundation of who we are. Michelle: And they can be shockingly fragile. Vance tells the chilling story of the Satanic Panic that swept through a small town in Florida in the late 1980s. It started with a vague accusation against a local preschool. Police brought in therapists who used suggestive techniques and hypnosis on the children to "recover" repressed memories of abuse. Mark: Oh no. I have a bad feeling about where this is going. Michelle: It became a full-blown witch hunt. The children started "remembering" the most horrific, elaborate, and physically impossible things—being forced to drink blood, witnessing animal and even human sacrifices, being flown through the air. The town was gripped by terror. Parents armed themselves. People's lives were destroyed. Mark: That's terrifying. You're saying these kids, and even the adults, genuinely believed these things happened? How is that possible? Michelle: It’s possible because of how memory works. The leading researcher in this field, Elizabeth Loftus, proved how easy it is to implant false memories. In one classic study, she showed people slides of a car accident involving a red Datsun at a stop sign. Later, she’d ask them a question but subtly change one detail, like, "Did another car pass the Datsun while it was at the yield sign?" Mark: Just changing one word. Michelle: Just one word. But later, a significant number of those people would swear they had seen a yield sign, not a stop sign. The suggestion had overwritten the original memory. The therapists in Florida were doing this on a massive scale, feeding the children leading questions and validating their wildest imaginings until they became concrete, vivid, and utterly false memories. Mark: So the vividness of a memory doesn't guarantee it's real. That’s a scary thought. It makes you question everything. Michelle: It does. Vance even realized one of his own core memories was false. The story of his "miraculous" healing from Legionnaires' disease? He had a vivid memory of it—the wallpaper in the room, the look on his parents' faces. But he was only one and a half years old. The brain isn't capable of forming those kinds of long-term narrative memories at that age. He realized his "memory" was a story he had constructed over years of hearing his parents tell it. It felt completely real, but it was a fiction.

Mark: So after all this—placebos, curses, false memories—what's the takeaway? Are we just hopelessly suggestible, at the mercy of any story that comes our way? Michelle: I think the book’s message is actually empowering. Suggestibility isn't a flaw; it's a fundamental, and powerful, feature of our biology. The point isn't to become a hardened cynic who believes nothing. The point is to become more aware. We can't escape our suggestible nature, but we can become more conscious about the stories we choose to believe, both from the outside world and from within ourselves. Mark: So it’s about curating our own beliefs, in a way. Choosing our placebos wisely. Michelle: Exactly. Vance offers a few simple rules for this, but the most important one is "Know thyself." Understand what kinds of stories and which sources of authority you find convincing. Are you moved by scientific data? Ancient tradition? A charismatic personality? Knowing your own suggestibility profile is the first step to harnessing it. Mark: It’s a shift from seeing suggestibility as a weakness to seeing it as a tool. A potentially dangerous tool, but a tool nonetheless. Michelle: A tool that connects the mind and body in ways we're only just beginning to understand. The book challenges us to stop acting as if there's a hard line between them. The brain is a physical organ that runs on stories, and those stories have physical consequences. Mark: The book leaves us with a powerful question, then. The author quotes C.S. Lewis, who said, "Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." Since we are all storytellers, and the most powerful story is the one we tell ourselves, what story are you choosing to live in? Michelle: That's the perfect question to end on. We’d love to hear from our listeners about this. Have you ever had an experience where your expectation dramatically changed an outcome? A time a placebo worked for you, or a nocebo made things worse? Share your stories with us on our social channels. Mark: It’s a fascinating and deeply personal topic. This was an incredible exploration. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.