ArchiveFM

With new research demonstrating the startling power of the placebo effect, this hour of Radiolab examines the chemical consequences of belief and imagination.
Duration
1h 2m
Broadcast on
17 May 2007
Audio Format
other

With new research demonstrating the startling power of the placebo effect, this hour of Radiolab examines the chemical consequences of belief and imagination.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WNYC Studios is supported by WISE. WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a WISE account, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Terms and conditions apply. WNYC Studios is supported by Odo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out [email protected]. That's O-D-O-O.com.
You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio WNYC. And NPR. I'm Chad, I've been Rod. And I'm Robert Krollick. And this is Radio Lab season three. Let me start with a story. Okay. 1893, an anthropologist, Franz Boas, goes to the woods of British Columbia. He has a giant wax cylinder recorder with him and he records this guy singing a healing song. And who's this? This gentleman is an Indian from the Quacootle tribe and his name, we're told, is Cusaelid, or Kesselid. I've always pronounced it Kesselid. I don't know. I'm not quite sure how it would be pronounced in Quacootle. It's Daniel Mormon. He's an anthropologist. He's written a lot about Kesselid because it's a neat story and it goes like this. The young Kesselid begins as a skeptic. He was skeptical about the activities of the shaman. He thought they were tricking people in some way. The shaman are the village healers. Very, very powerful men. They were scary men and he sees them doing these dramatic healing rituals and he thought they were full of it. And so he decided to go undercover. One day Kessel approaches some of these shaman and asks if he can apprentice with them. Yeah, there's three or four of them taking them out into the woods into a clearing or something and they tell them a bunch of things and they taught him the songs. And he learned that stuff. And eventually, after he gained their trust a little, they taught him their best trick of all. That's widespread in the world of shamanism. Well, you find variations on it all over the world. Here's what you do, they tell them. Get some feathers, some down feathers and just tuck it in your cheek. Just stick it in your mouth secretly so that nobody knew that it was there. Then during the ritual, let's say the patient is there, they're on the ground, maybe their chest hurts, you lean down. Literally, get down in it. Put your mouth on the patient's chest and suck. And here's the last step. While you're sucking, you bite the inside of your cheek to get some blood in there, which mixes with the feathers. Then at the pivotal point, you throw your head back and cough out the feathers. Which were now bloody and nasty. So you end up with this bit of bloody down in the palm of your hand, which you would then say is the disease which you have sucked out of the body of the patient. Kessel had learned all this and thought, I knew it. Those liars. The problem was that part of the obligation of his apprenticeship was that whenever anybody asked he had to go and treat them for free, that was sort of part of the deal of being an apprentice. And somebody from a famous family called him to come and treat a daughter who was sick. Very sick, according to the written account. And so he went to see this family and he treated the girl and he went through the songs that he's saying. And then he did the feather trick, which he knew was false. He put feathers in his mouth, bit the inside of his cheek, pretended to suck, coughed the whole thing out. And lo and behold, she was healed. She was fine. She was fine. Yeah, it was a great success. Wow. And what did he think? Well, he clearly indicates a kind of ambiguity. He knows that he was tricking her, but he also knows that she's better. Not convinced. Kessel tries to trick again and again and again. And every time he does it, it works. So at the end of the story, he decides to become a healer. Does that mean that he ends up believing in the lie that he's set out to disprove? I think that he realizes that truth and lies are not that fundamentally different as we might think they are.

Transcription truncated.

With new research demonstrating the startling power of the placebo effect, this hour of Radiolab examines the chemical consequences of belief and imagination.