Nocebo/Placebo

In The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, there is a remarkable story about Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a 16th-century Spanish explorer who spent 8 years travelling on foot from Florida to Mexico. His account, La relacion, describes extreme hardship, as well as a detailed and sympathetic portrait of the Native American tribes he lived among. Many tribes believed the strange white foreigners to be capable of great healing and begged them to cure their sick. In this way the explorers became reluctant faith healers, and progressed to curing cripples and raising the dead. Soon they could not move for the press of eager villagers and the explorers became very angry. Then,

a strange thing happened… [M]any of them fell ill, and eight men died the next day. All over the land, in the places where this became known, they were so afraid of us that it seemed that the very sight of us made them almost die of fear.
They implored us not to be angry, nor to wish for any more of them to die; and they were altogether convinced that we killed them simply by wishing to.

This is a powerful example of the flip-side of placebo effect, known as the nocebo effect, caused simply by suggestion or belief. It’s a fascinating, highly complex subject and I love Ben Goldacre’s well-reasoned explanation. Well worth the 5 minutes!



NOTE: Ben has re-posted this, along with another very entertaining clip from Nerdstock with delves further into the placebo/nocebo effect. This second clip is hilarious, but NSFW: Nocebo

We Are All Connected

[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

[Feynman]
I think nature's imagination
Is so much greater than man's
She's never going to let us relax

[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

[Nye]
I'm this guy standing on a planet
Really I'm just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There's billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We're made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)

[Feynman]
There's this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other

And it's all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it's all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature.

Eye Evolution

As part of the Expelled Exposed site, there are a series of educational videos to counter creationist claims. They're short, simple, and easy to understand.