I Watch 3 Episodes of Mind Field With Our Experts & Researchers
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Hey Vsauce! Michael here. Every episode of Mind Field is now free to view all over the world, all 24 episodes, all three seasons. Whoa! It is really exciting. And it's why I've invited you here to Vsauce headquarters. Why watch Mind Field alone when you could watch it with me and some of the researchers, writers, scientists, and teachers who are in the episodes who made Mind Field what it is? That's right, we are about to have ourselves a Mind Field marathon. We are going to watch three episodes in their entirety, pausing throughout to talk more deeply about the concepts in the episodes. It's gonna be very exciting, and it's all going to happen right in here, follow me. After you.
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We're going to begin with an episode that helped new research happen and improved the lives of some very special children. Season Two, Episode Six, the Power of Suggestion.
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This is McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It boasts an enrollment of more than 40,000 students from 150 countries. The campus employs 1,700 professors, teaching 300 programs of study, and it's proud to be home to 12 Nobel Prize winners. It is considered one of the finest research universities in the world. Recently, researchers at McGill have embarked on a study that uses a brain scanning device to read people's minds and implant thoughts into their heads, or so their subjects think. Now the same device may be able to help kids with ADHD, anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, migraines, Tourette's, and more.
This study is not about technology. The MRI machine behind me may look impressive, but it's a sham; it's deactivated, non-functioning. What this study is really about is faith in science. It's about the power of thoughts to heal. All you need is the power of suggestion.
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A placebo is something that shouldn't work, but due to the power of suggestion, and because of the strength of our belief, it does. But we don't fully understand yet how they work; there could be an evolutionary explanation. For example, if a small child hurts themselves, negative symptoms like pain and crying can be good. They keep the child safe and still, while signaling adults to come help. When help arrives, even if it has no active effect, the child's brain may feel it has permission to redirect resources away from seeking help and on to actually healing. Modern medicine has found a way to harness this power by prescribing placebos.
But not all placebos work the same. For example, a sugar pill will help your headache more if given to you by a doctor than by a poker buddy, and the color of the placebo matters too. A blue pill will work to make you feel calm, better than a white pill, because blue is a more calming color. And a red pill will keep you awake and give you more energy than a blue pill will. A capsule will work better than a pill because it looks more important.
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And we're gonna stop right there because one of my guests already has a comment. Let me first introduce who the guests are. Daniel Toker is a PhD candidate at Berkeley who has been writing and researching for Mind Field at least season two and three.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep, and the Fear episode season four.
And the Fear episode, which isn't even out yet, but it might be by the time you watch this, in which case, it's out already! Thanks, Daniel.
On the far right side, we have Elisabeth de Kleer, who worked on season three as a producer and writer. She's a science communicator, science documentary filmmaker, but I save the middle for last because Dr. Samuel Veissière from the Culture, Mind and Brain lab at McGill University, one of the co-directors, is here. And he's also going to be featured quite prominently in this episode. You'll see him soon. And he is the one who told me, "Stop, let's talk," because we're gonna talk about placebos. And I just mentioned in the episode that the color of a pill affects how it can make you feel. A blue pill will tend to be more calming because so many of us associate blue with calming. However,...