(eerie sound)

- Hey Vsauce!

Michael here.

Every episode of Mind Field is now free to view

all over the world, all 24 episodes, all three seasons.

Whoa!

It is really exciting.

And it's why I've invited you hear to Vsauce headquarters.

Why watch Mind Field alone when you could watch it with me

and some of the researchers, writers, scientists

and teachers who are in the episodes

who made Mind Field what it is?

That's right,

we are about to have ourselves a Mind Field marathon.

We are going to watch three episodes in their entirety,

pausing throughout to talk more deeply

about the concepts in the episodes,

it's gonna be very exciting,

and it's all going to happen right in here, follow me.

After you.

(eerie sound)

We're going to begin with an episode

that helped new research happen and improved the lives

of some very special children.

Season Two, Episode Six, the Power of Suggestion.

(upbeat music)

This is McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

It boasts and enrollment

of more than 40,000 students from 150 countries,

the campus employs 1700 professors,

teaching 300 programs of study,

and it's proud to be home to 12 Nobel Prize winners,

it is considered

one of the finest research universities in the world.

Recently, researchers at McGill

have embarked on a study that uses a brain scanning device

to read people's minds and implant thoughts

into their heads, or so their subjects think.

Now the same device may be able

to help kids with ADHD, anxiety,

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,

migraines, Tourette's, and more.

This study is not about technology.

The MRI machine behind me may look impressive,

but it's a sham, it's deactivated, non functioning.

What this study is really about is faith, in science.

It's about the power of thoughts to heal.

All you need is the power of suggestion.

(machine humming)

(upbeat music)

A placebo is something that shouldn't work,

but due to the power of suggestion,

and because of the strength of our belief, does,

but we don't fully understand yet how they work,

there could be an evolutionary explanation.

For example, if a small child hurts themselves,

negative symptoms like pain and crying can be good.

They keep the child safe and still,

while signaling adults to come help.

When help arrives, even if it has no active effect.

The child's brain may feel it has permission

to redirect resources away from seeking help,

and on to actually healing.

Modern medicine has found a way to harness

this power by prescribing placebos.

But not all placebos work the same.

For example, a sugar pill will help your headache more

if given to you by a doctor than by a poker buddy,

and the color of the placebo matters too.

A blue pill will work to make you feel calm,

better than a white pill,

because blue is a more calming color.

And a red pill will keep you awake

and give you more energy than a blue pill will.

A capsule will work better than a pill

because it looks more important.

(upbeat music)

And we're gonna stop right there

because one of my guests already has a comment.

Let me first introduce who the guests are.

Daniel Toker is a PhD candidate at Berkeley

who has been writing and researching for Mind Field

at least season two and three.

- Yep. - Yeah.

- Yep, and the Fear episode season four.

- And the Fear episode, which isn't even out yet,

but it might be by the time you watch this,

in which case, it's out already!

Thanks, Daniel.

On the far right side, we have Elisabeth de Kleer,

who worked on season three as a producer, writer.

She's a science communicator, science documentary filmmaker,

but I save the middle for last

because Dr. Samuel Veissière

from the Culture, Mind and Brain lab at McGill University,

one of the CO directors is here.

And he's also going to be featured

quite prominently in this episode.

You'll see him soon.

And he is the one who told me, Stop let's talk,

because we're gonna talk about placebos.

And I just mentioned in the episode that the color of a pill

affects how it can make you feel.

A blue pill will tend to be more calming

because so many of us associate blue with calming.

However, we need to be,

when you put a star on so many of us.

- Yeah, so reportedly in Italy,

blue pills don't have a calming effect

because people associate the color blue

with the soccer jersey of the national soccer team.

So they tend to associate it

with a kind of a feeling of arousal and not calmness.

So it's interesting to try to parse out,

the different effects of some colors.

Red seems fairly universal

as something that triggers high arousal, but not blue.

- Is that because red is the color of blood, you think?

- I'm really not sure.

I mean, as you know,

we seem to have some inbuilt attentional biases towards red

like say the little buzzing red lights on smartphones

works really well that way

because we tend to automatically attend to them.

It could be blood, yeah, could be fire even

because we also have an attentional bias towards fire.

- Wait, but how universal is this?

Have studies looked at Papua New Guinea

and populations there that don't watch the movies

and don't have the stories

that we have in America or in Europe?

I mean, is this something that, you said in built?

Is it really?

- I'm not aware of all the studies,

I think red for sure is something

for which we have a relatively innate attentional bias,

red processeses salient in the environment.

- This is so much of it depends on the person,

like there could be a person here in America

for whom red is really calming

because of their particular circumstances.

- Yeah, it's actually funny,

I just got back from China yesterday.

So I flew in.

And one of the things you notice even from the sky,

looking down over Chinese cities

is how much red lighting there is, big red LEDs.

And so I associate red with stop, like if red,

it's meant to catch my attention, It's sort of alarming.

But in China actually, it's ubiquitous.

And it's more just like a color of good luck.

Most restaurants have their title

of the restaurant in red.

So it's also meant to catch your attention,

to simulate arousal but in less of like a negative way

that it can sometimes be here in the United States,

so red street sign isn't necessarily gonna be.

- So probably the emotional valence is conditioned

and culturally contingent on some level.

But that red is gonna be salient,

is gonna be something that we can automatically attend to.

That's fairly universal.

- And once we attend to it, how we feel may depend a lot

on the culture that we're from.

- Right.

- But I think the point is that even things like the color

and size and shape of a pill

and who gives it to you will affect how it works.

It's not just the chemical properties of the medicine,

there's so much more, so much in the mental world.

- Well, I mean, but that also is chemical ultimately, right?

Because if it's a blue pill or red pill,

that's gonna affect your neuro chemistry in some way.

- And you know what, why is it red or blue?

Because of the physical shape of the molecules,

The shape? - Right.

- Wow!

So, right, I guess this is gonna be a question

I wanna keep coming back to

how do we really define a placebo?

Because I think in the episode,

I say something like there's no active ingredient

that should cause that effect.

But yet, if a pill is calming,

because it happens to be blue,

because its molecular structure

reflects blue light the best,

then there is something chemically in that pill

that works in calming you.

And it's not because the ingestion helps,

it's just the color alone.

- Right, right.

I guess it's easier to define what's not a placebo,

as something that works better than a placebo?

- Well, that's why another term for placebo effects

are nonspecific effects, or nonspecific factors.

So whatever factors involved in healing

that we cannot attribute to the chemical substance

that is targeted in the treatment.

And there are also non specific effects in psychotherapy

even that are, so tone of voice setting, waiting times.

So placebo is really a filler term

for all these different psychosocial symbolic ritual factors

that we don't fully understand,

but that we know contribute to a cure somehow.

- Right?

So those are called non specific, the specific ones.

How are they defined they are.

- So the specific one would be

the actual analgesic property of a pill,

for example, has been well studied in RCT,

we know it produces that effect.

But then we know that there are other effects around

and beyond that, that also contribute to healing.

And in the case of an actual placebo procedure,

where we know that specific molecule

is not actually present in the pill,

but healing will still happen, then we need to investigate

these different effects, these different factors.

That are nonspecific.

- Maybe this works, a nonspecific,

non placebo effect of a medicine would be what works,

even when it's administered to someone in a coma,

who doesn't know what's happening,

doesn't know who's administering it.

But we know that that molecule in the blood

causes blood pressure to go down,

or whatever, causes pain to be felt less, I don't know.

- But be careful because there are,

placebo effects have been found, for example,

in nonverbal autistic children,

who for sure cannot understand the nature of the suggestion,

because, of course, if you have some kind of an idea

about a therapeutic target and a mechanism of action,

so I have a headache,

and this one pill removes the headache,

then that will greatly help in the placebo effect.

But what about the case of autistic nonverbal children

who have no idea, who don't expect anything,

and yet there's an effect,

there's a social cognitive component to placebo effects,

you have to be able to expect

what other people expect of you even implicitly.

So probably in the case of the nonverbal autistic children,

it's also say, the reassuring tone of voice of the parent,

the parents shifted expectations,

the sort of contagious hope that might work.

And the same mechanism, same social mechanism

might be involved in dogs and in advanced social species

through observation and kind of social emotional contagion.

- Very cool.