Hand Cream, Electric Shocks and Self-Determination

A quote from Jonah Lehrer's book, How We Decide:

"A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electrical shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. Half of the people were then supplied with a fake pain-relieving cream. Even though the cream had no analgesic properties⎯it was just a hand moisturizer⎯people given the pretend cream said the shocks were significantly less painful. The placebo effect eased their suffering. Wager then imaged the specific parts of the brain that controlled this psychological process. He discovered that the placebo effect depended largely on activity in the prefrontal cortex. When people were told that they'd just received a pain-relieving cream, their frontal lobes responded by inhibiting the activity of emotional brain areas (like the insula) that normally respond to bodily pain. Because people expected to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies."

I began to wonder how often we provide our own placebos, create our own self-fulfulling prophecy. The power of anticipation to color our experiences is something that I believe we all instinctively have a sense of. It is not, perhaps, given as much weight and consideration as it should. It is, apparently, a neurological phenomenon. If we anticipate pain, we experience it; if we anticipate a lack or diminishment of pain then we experience that as well.

The corollary to anticipation or self-placebo being a determinant in whether our experience is painful or not, is that our experiences of pleasant versus unpleasant color our reactions to our experience, which then influence the outcome.

So, those "creating our reality" people are right, at least on this point. Fearing the worst can contribute to creating the worst and vice versa. The crucial piece of this construct is that you can't think or suppose that things will be painless; you must know it. This difference is importance in the brain's response where the "reality" is created and is where it becomes more difficult. It is not a matter of pasting on a smile (although your mother was right; a smile does have some part in changing how you feel); it is deep seated trust in the character of the experience.