Erik Vance > Quotes

“Your brain is wired to build expectations throughout your life over hours, years, or decades, then tries its best to turn those expectations into reality. Simply put, your brain doesn't want to be wrong - and in order for expectation to match reality, it's willing to bend a few rules or even cheat outright. When expectations clash with reality, more often than not, it's your stubborn brain that wins.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Humans are not alone in creating false memories; pigeons, mice, and even bumblebees seem to have them.c That suggests false memories may just be a part of how we think—a by-product of our innate ability to group things together by theme. As Schacter says, memories are a tool to help animals predict the future by using the past. And to do that, we humans have become experts at quickly grouping things together and creating patterns.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Is it such a leap to think that the number of people using a given therapy is not just an effect of how well that therapy works but the cause of how well it works? Viewed this way, vasopressin and oxytocin might be the difference between saying, “Take this; it works” and “Take this; a billion people say it works.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“As with homeopathy, magnetism is the kind of idea that made sense at a visceral level. Yeah, magnets—that’s what it’s all about! It was similar to the way people talk about quantum physics today: a complicated, ill-understood phenomenon that seems important, but one that people just can’t wrap their heads around. So they did the next best thing: They found a few metaphors and ran with it.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“But vasopressin and oxytocin aren’t just drugs; they’re also hormones that play a major role in social interactions between people. Vasopressin, for example, seems to regulate social communication and conciliatory behavior. Oxytocin seems to be involved in experiences of empathy, trust, and social learning. In other words, the same chemicals that draw us together as humans and allow us to live and work together can also boost the placebo response. Imagine if there was a way to harness that power.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Zhang says that Western medicine is a straight line—always refining itself, always moving forward—while Chinese medicine is a circle around a fixed dot. The fundamentals never change, just your interpretations of them.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“long after an injury is gone, the pain can hang around, like an uninvited guest sleeping on your couch. Doctors call this chronic pain,”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“People, it seems, are programmed with a preexisting need to go with the herd. In an instant, people tapped into a more powerful placebo response than if they had spent hours conditioning themselves. Let that sink in for a second. Someone else’s opinion is not only powerful, it can be more powerful than your own. It can be more powerful than your experience and even more powerful than repeated conditioning. We are hardwired to follow other people’s opinions.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“suggestibility relies partially on belief and good storytelling but receives a boost from the power of social pressure.)”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Many people think of memory as some kind of video, one that you can simply rewind to see what happened.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“although to people experiencing them meditation and hypnosis can feel very similar, they create very different scenarios. The “stadium chant” that many parts of your brain participate in during meditation is measurably slower than in daily life. And with hypnosis, it becomes even slower. About the only way to get brain rhythms slower than those during hypnosis would be to fall into a coma.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“This preeminence of fear over hope is older than modern humans. We see it in animals and we see it in newborn babies who haven’t developed the more advanced parts of the brain yet. Throughout the natural world, there are a few rewards for creatures that take a risk. But mostly they aren’t as big as the penalties. Nature favors the cautious.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Whether it’s a curse or a blessing, the power of belief comes from two little words: What if?”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“But sometimes circumstances don’t fit the model of the world that your brain has built. So rather than change its expectation, your brain will occasionally twist reality to bring your observations in line with your expectations. Therefore, if what you expect is negative, your mind will make things look (or feel) worse than they actually are. But if you expect the best—well, some pretty amazing things can happen in your body,”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“One of Hippocrates’ two lasting contributions to medicine was the idea that quiet rest is the first step to good treatment (summarized by the famous mantra “do no harm,” which was coined 2,000 years later) and is itself a kind of placebo.*”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Homeopaths make the argument that a mysterious active ingredient is driving all this, but decades of searching haven’t turned up anything.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Our uncanny ability to deceive ourselves holds startling implications for our health and well-being.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Memory really is the version we told most recently,” Schacter says. “That function—flexible use of the past to think about the future—is something that may make memory error prone.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Inside us is an expectation-fueled suite of drugs poised to change how we see painful experiences. But can we harness those drugs? It turns out we already do.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Newton, a keen observer of human behavior, says this works because humans evolved in communities. We can’t help it; we want to be a part of the crowd. By signaling to the audience that he is their leader, Newton primes them to obey his suggestions. When it’s really working, he says, the hypnotist is even more amazed than the audience.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Something else is happening. Something was giving me the power to heal myself as a child.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“These two complementary ideas—suggestion and expectation—are at the heart of unlocking your internal medicine cabinet.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“We are programmed to fear first and have hope later, as long as we’re sure there’s nothing to fear.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“initially, pain is a warning system, but if it becomes chronic, it turns into something else: a sort of continual feedback loop. “Many people eventually stop coding the danger signal. But some people don’t seem to,” he says. “It’s a problem of accepting, coding, interpreting, and responding.” In other words, prediction. Expectation. No one told the brain that it’s no longer in danger, so it keeps expecting danger and warning the body. This is why anxiety, depression, and stress are so closely linked to chronic pain. The game becomes finding ways to tell the brain it’s OK to relax, even if that means tricking it. Mackey and other pain doctors can do this using pain blockers that stop the warning messages from transmitting, thus forcing the brain to realize it’s no longer in pain.† So is there a way to enhance the placebo effect, even make it permanent?”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Today, Wager’s Science paper has been referenced in hundreds of other prestigious research journals and is often credited with anointing placebos as a true neurochemical phenomenon, not mere self-delusion.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“By now you should be noticing a pattern in the drugs that seem most connected with the placebo effect: opioids, cannabinoids, serotonin. These are all needed for the treatment of pain, depression, anxiety, irritable bowels, nausea, and addiction—the conditions that are unusually responsive to placebos. But there is one more to add to the pile, and it’s perhaps the most important chemical in your inner pharmacy: dopamine.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Everyone’s door to expectation has a different key, and everyone is suggestible in a slightly different way. But once that door is unlocked, we have access to an amazing power to heal ourselves.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Psychology is neuroscience.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“Hammerstrom explains that unlike almost every other form of alternative treatment, Christian Science permeates every aspect of its adherents’ lives. “It’s so much more than an alternative means of health care,” she says. “Christian Scientists feel that this is a way of life. It doesn’t just affect their physical bodies. It affects their relationships and their jobs.”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

“would rather know the person who has the disease than the disease the person has. —Hippocrates”
― Erik Vance, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal