Derek Thompson

We call it a nocebo effect.

That when I focus my attention on that painful signal and I anticipate it to increase and I begin losing agency around my ability to contain that pain, it amplifies and amplifies and amplifies until it becomes debilitating.

And so it turns out that we can heal these illnesses, these suffering in the mind, just as much as actually we can create these maladies as well.

Not that it's not real.

I think some people hear that and say, well, are you saying that my pain is not real?

No, no, no, no.

All pain is real.

All pain is real.

And all pain is in the brain.

Pain doesn't happen in your arm or in your back.

That's not where pain happens.

Pain happens based on the interpretation of signal, of data, just like we talked about earlier, those 11 million bits of information, that war and peace twice every second.

It's just data.

It's just information.

Now,

your brain's interpretation of that data is in fact what creates suffering.

So this has massive implications.

If you think about not only to medical science, we know that about 80% of healthcare spending is not spent on sickness.

It's spent on illness.

It's spent on curing the symptoms of those maladies.