Weird Things

[Yes]

Okay i noticed this a long time ago but when i'm yawning and I think about "How to yawn" I stop yawning in the middle of my yawn. Eventually it just gets super hard to yawn if it gets stuck into my head. Try it. Tell me if it works. Right when you start, think about How to yawn or why we yawn. Just do it. Anyways does anybody else know anything weird or cool?

[a-4-year-old]

you can trick yourself into thinking you are tired, sick, even nauseous; even when you are perfectly fine.

The mind is an interesting thing.

[Lord Frunkamunch]

Speaking of which...(zees has been poshteet befoor, baht eets steel eentureisink)

This is something strange that has baffeled scientist. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's.

The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something. We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.