Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal

by Erik Vance, Richard Powers Narrated by Richard Powers

Overview

This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains?

Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events. Drawing on centuries of research and interviews with leading experts in the field, Vance takes us on a fascinating adventure from Harvard's research labs to a witch doctor's office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative medicine school near Beijing (often called “China's Hogwarts”). Vance's firsthand dispatches will change the way you think-and feel.

Continuing the success of National Geographic's brain books and rounding out our pop science category, this book shows how expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and minds. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”-the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this idea is centuries of placebo research in a range of forms, from sugar pills to shock waves; studies of alternative medicine techniques heralded and condemned in different parts of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advances in brain mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we're learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for personalized medicine, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such study.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/22/2016
Science journalist Vance takes an inspired journey into the profound and often unnoticed powers of our brains. Perhaps the book’s most constant, fascinating thread is Vance’s willingness to personally investigate each topic about which he writes. Many of the studies he outlines are described through his extensive conversations with the researchers themselves. In fact, Vance’s interest in the topic of suggestion began with having been seemingly healed by Christian Science as a child—an experience that becomes a recurring theme, deserving of its own standalone memoir. But the subject of the brain’s malleability leads Vance through a range of topics beyond his past, including hypnosis, false memories, and the challenges of measuring the efficacy of drug treatments. Supplementing this diversely experiential approach are compelling chapters on the science of the brain, in which the emphasis is not on finding the answers but on exploring the questions. Vance also presents a “Rapid Induction Analgesia Procedure” (hypnosis) exercise, though this seems to require a guided experience beyond reading. Most of all, he offers an understanding of the ways in which beliefs can lead to a better life. Agent: Susan Lee Cohen, Riverside Literary Agency. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"An eye-opening exploration of the intersection between philosophy and science and a fascinating peek into our innermost selves." —Kirkus Reviews

"Science journalist Vance takes an inspired journey into the profound and often unnoticed powers of our brains." —Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Review

Sept. 6, 2016
The human mind is capable of astonishing feats, but does it hold the power to alleviate pain, or even cure disease, simply through suggestibility?The placebo effect, in which an inert substance relieves symptoms simply because the patient thinks it’s an active pill, is among the most fascinating subjects in medicine. The importance of the placebo effect is so integral to clinical trials that no pharmaceutical study is permitted unless it compares the results of medicated subjects with those of a placebo group. In his compelling book, Discover contributing editor Vance, whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, Scientific American, and elsewhere, chronicles his travels around the world and through history to detail the unexpected ways our lives and outlooks are affected by similar forms of suggestibility. Raised as a Christian Scientist, the author grew up in a community that believed God’s healing power alone could cure any ailment. In an enthralling anecdote, he relives his recovery from Legionnaires’ disease as a toddler and how the turning point of his near-death experience was his mother’s abandonment of fear and trust in God. This is not to say that Vance is advocating religion in lieu of antibiotics—far from it—but in this and many other first-person narratives, he challenges traditional views on the effect of expectation, or suggestibility, on the physical body. He shows that modern neuroscience supports this line of inquiry. Brain chemistry has long been known to affect mood, regulate pain, and even affect gastrointestinal health, and cutting-edge techniques to map brain activity provide new insight. As the author frequently points out, if scientists are able to apply clinical data to the age-old mind-body problem, it may be possible to personalize medicine to an extent never before dreamed of. An eye-opening exploration of the intersection between philosophy and science and a fascinating peek into our innermost selves.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169751147
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos