The placebo effect reflects how context and prior beliefs can shape the brain's responses to its environment.

The mindset you bring to a creative challenge may be part of the cognitive machinery itself.

Study participants who took cognitive training improved but those with positive expectations had larger gains.

Most of us picture a placebo in a very specific way: a sugar pill, a clinical trial, a chart showing symptoms going down. In that framing, a placebo belongs mostly to medicine: important, even powerful—but largely confined to the treatment of pain or discomfort.

One of the questions that has guided my work is whether placebo effects extend beyond these settings.

At its core, the placebo effect represents a situation in which expectations about a treatment lead to meaningful improvements in symptoms, even when the treatment itself contains no pharmacological ingredients (i.e., a placebo). Importantly, the placebo effect is not about deception. It reflects how context and prior beliefs can shape the brain's responses to its environment. Indeed, the placebo effect is not "all in our heads"—it induces genuine changes in the brain's chemistry, including the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and endogenous opioids.

Now, if expectations can influence pain or nausea, there is no........

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