## This Video Will Hurt
Please, put on your headphones -- I promise that there won't be any loud sounds, but this
video is going to hurt.
There's a study about hypersounds and how they cause headaches: these sounds are too
high-pitched to hear -- like the one added to this video, playing right now -- but cause
headaches they still do.
The hypersound in your headphones is pressing on your inner ear, stressing the nerves leading
to your brain where, if the headache hasn't started already, it soon will as exposure
causes headaches after only ten seconds.
Oh my.
Can you feel it?
That pressure on your ears spreading to your now throbbing brain?
Because...
...you shouldn't: the study is made up and there's no hypersound in the audio, but still
some of you will have began to feel a headache.
Why?
The nocebo effect.
A nocebo is a harmless thing -- like a video with nonexistent hypersounds -- that causes
harm -- like a headache -- because you *believe* it's harmful.
That sounds like Voodoo, but there's science behind the nocebo effect, which is more than
an irritating parlor trick, it causes real problems like in medicine.
When testing a new drug doctors get a group of sick people give half of them the new drug
and give the other have a fake pill that does nothing -- but which they're told is real.
This is how science finds the stuff that works amongst the junk that doesn't.
But new drugs have side effects and sometimes patients drop out of the experiment because
of them.
No surprise there.
But some people on the fake *also* drop out from the side effects.
Side effects they've gotten from a drug they *aren't* taking.
But because they *think* they're on the real thing, they've also *thought* themselves into
the side effects.
Now maybe this is just a case of misattribution: people get headaches and, if they're joined
a drug trial that lists headaches in the side effects, it's natural to blame the new drug
-- and that certainly happens to some extent.
But the nocebo effects is more than just misattribution, it causes real, additional harm that scientists
can measure in cruel, cruel experiments -- and this is one of the reasons there not an over
abundance of research on nocoboes: approach your friendly neighborhood ethics board with
an experiment designed to hurt people and they'll frown on that.
But sometimes nocebo experiments do get approved to the benefit of science and humanity, if
not the participants.
For example, under the right conditions some people who expect a harmless injection will
give them a rash will get a rash, but for people who expect nothing to happen, nothing
is exactly what happens.
And fake pills can be additive: take test subjects off pills they believe are addictive
and some will experience nocebic withdrawal symptoms -- like pain and fatigue -- from
the pills that they could never have been addicted to in the first place.
Another experiment gave people harmless injections, told half of them to just sit there and told
the other half that their pain would increase for the next thirty minutes -- which it did.
But in this situation there is a drug that can block the nocebo effect and those who
were told the injection would hurt, but were also secretly given the nocebo-blocking drug
did *not* report an increase in pain -- showing that the nocebo effect is a real, physical
process.
In all these nocebo experiments it's the belief in harm that matters.
If someone dressed as a voodoo witch doctor popped up and hexed you with a curse of great
pain -- no effect.
But, in a room with a real doctor and his clipboard and a big science machine and a
needle in your arm, you'll take his words rather more seriously.
Which is why doctors say: "This won't hurt a bit" rather than "Oh this?
It's going to hurt.
Like *a lot*." -- which, by the way, was a real experiment done on women undergoing labor
during spinal injections.
Guess how that turned out?
But nocebos don't end here.
While illnesses like the flu, spread from contact with disgusting, germ-infected humans
and the things they touch with their, disgusting germy hands -- a nocebo spreads from mind
to mind, no contact required.
A notable example happened in a Tennessee high school.
One teacher reported a strange smell in her classroom and developed symptoms of headache
nausea, and difficulty breathing.
These symptoms spread to some of her students and from them to others in the school.
Almost two hundred people ended up at the local hospital but all medical tests came
back with nothing, nor was anything harmful found at the school.
This was a nocebo -- the belief that the air was making them sick -- spread mind to mind.
Everyone who got sick heard about the symptoms from someone else.
When this happens, it's called mass psychogenic illness.
The treatment in these cases is to separate those with symptoms from the rest and reassure
the ill that yes, their symptoms are real, but no they haven't been exposed to anything
toxic, and yes people are getting better quickly:
The last is one of the indicators that separates a real poison gas leak or biological weapon
from mass psychogenic illness.
But the final factor, number of cases increasing with greater media coverage, can lead to this
kind of thing spreading far and wide.
Take, electrosensitives: people who get nausea (among other things) from exposure to parts
of the electromagnetic spectrum, notably WiFi the density of which is increasing over time,
forcing particularly bad sufferers to retreat to places like the creepy-sounding radio science
zone in, where else, West Virginia.
But put electrosensitives in a room with a WiFi router and they can't actually tell via
their symptoms if it's on or off.
Instead their symptoms track with being told if it's on or off.
And if you make a group of people without electrosensitivity watch a news report on
how Wifi makes you ill while another group watches something uninformative and afterward
expose both groups to a fake Wifi signal only some of those who watched the news report
feel sick.
There's a similar phenomenon called 'wind farm disease' with similar side effects, which
turns up where it's been talked about on the local news, but not in other places in the
same country with the same wind farms where it isn't.
All this makes it too easy to mock people for thinking they're getting sick from WiFi
or Wind farms or *Wind farms with WiFi* -- but it's important to realize they're not crazy,
the side effects are real, they're just wrong about the source: all evidence points to the
belief in electrosensitivy as the cause of electrosensitivity.
Which means the news reports talking about these illnesses are spreading a kind of mind
virus.
And while these are exotic examples, there is also evidence that some allergies and asthma
cases are nocebic and thus able to be spread in the same way.
To be clear: if someone's having an asthma attack, that's not the time to tell them you
know they're being a drama llama because you watched an Internet video about the nocebo
effect.
*They're really having an asthma attack* and they *really* need something to make it stop
and that's *really* not you showing off your knowledge.
Harmful things aren't harmful just because we believe they are -- the right dose of arsenic
will kill you as surely as an anvil to the head, no matter your insistence otherwise.
But the nocebo effect does show that our beliefs about otherwise harmless things can make them
harmful.
Which means that our voodoo doctor's hex from before really could work, but only if you
were foolish enough to believe him.