Dr. Andrew Huberman

I said, really?

He said, yeah, there's some evidence that keeping levels of neuromodulators like dopamine and acetylcholine elevated despite the

increases in blood pressure that are caused by consuming nicotine may indeed offset Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

I'm not telling you this as a clinical trial.

I'm telling you this as anecdata.

He is a Nobel Prize winner.

He's still very, very sharp in his 80s.

The point here is that in a study of nicotine and cognition, where people's cognition is indeed enhanced by nicotine, everybody knows that and agrees upon that, people who were told they had a higher dose of nicotine

performed better in this cognitive task when in fact they consumed zero.

And people who performed moderately, who were then told that they had consumed a higher dose of nicotine, performed better than those that simply consumed the

moderate dose and we're told they had a moderate dose.

In other words, everyone gets the same dose, either zero or moderate, but depending on what you're told, your performance changes accordingly.

And that's cool, but what's really cool about the study is they actually recorded from brain centers

of these individuals and the levels of activity in particular areas of the brain that are relevant for cognition changed according to what the people believe.

So there you go.

Placebo effect is changing neural activity.

It's not all just through what you think is happening.

What you think is happening is the reflection of neural activity.

And then you go, well, of course, but I think it's an important study.

So I believe in the placebo effect and it is dose dependent and that raises all sorts of scary concerns.