Placebo effects are not about expectation, or positive thinking, and you don’t have to believe you’re taking a real drug to feel better. In fact, they are not all in your mind at all, but your body.

This is what self-confessed ‘deviant’ Ted Kaptchuk wants you to know, after conducting decades of research that has shocked the medical establishment and turned upside down conventional thinking about placebos.

I’ve been a fan of Ted’s work ever since we first met in 2014, when I was researching my book Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body. He originally trained in Chinese medicine (one of the first westerners to do so in China), and he is now a professor of medicine at Harvard, where he directs Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.

Ted has been doing some wild things there: listening to patients; thinking carefully about what’s really making us better when we receive a treatment; and exploring what happens if you give people medicine without the drugs.

His trials break all the normal rules, but they show us how we might approach medicine differently, particularly for the very conditions that our drugs are usually worst at treating – from depression, fatigue, and anxiety to many skin conditions, gut problems and especially chronic pain. His results also dovetail perfectly with the latest results from neuroscience about how we perceive not just bodily symptoms, but our entire reality.

I asked Ted about his rebellious background, the inspirations for some of his craziest experiments, and how to unlock our inner pharmacy.

Ted Kaptchuk’s home page at Harvard:

https://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/ted-jack-kaptchuk

Ted’s website:

https://www.tedkaptchuk.com/

Lecture series I presented for The Great Courses on mind-body links in medicine (the first two are all about placebos, including Ted’s work):

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-power-of-mind-over-body

Honest fakery: How placebos can treat chronic pain:

https://www.nature.com/articles/535S14a

Ted’s first 2010 trial on honest placebos:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015591&

Academic review on placebos for chronic pain (2020):

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m1668.abstract

'The dress':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:

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This week we’ll be diving into the world of whales - as well as dolphins and other cetaceans - with biologist and filmmaker Tom Mustill, author of the fascinating book How to Speak Whale. I first learned about Tom’s work in 2023 when I attended a talk he gave at the British Library, and he began with the story of how on a kayaking trip he was almost crushed by a breaching humpback whale.

After that experience, and the discovery that the whale may actually have saved his life by twisting in the air to avoid him, Tom became fascinated by the inner lives of these creatures, and by the exploding potential of technology, including AI, to monitor and understand what they’re getting up to beneath the waves. And there was one question he wanted to answer most of all about their complex communications: could we ever learn to understand them, even talk to them?

That might seem a crazy question, but the availability of massive amounts of data, combined with AI algorithms, is now opening a door to decoding the patterns and structures in the vocalisations of all kinds of species, like a kind of Google Translate but for animals.

I caught up with Tom to talk about the latest results, as well as what it’s like to be caught underneath a falling humpback - and why we should stop comparing animals’ abilities to ours, and instead open our minds to other kinds of experiences, to the alien horizons of their lives and worlds.

Tom’s home page

https://www.tommustill.com/

Tom’s book, How To Speak Whale: A voyage into the future of animal communication

https://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale

Footage of the humpback whale landing on Tom and Charlotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee79_7CZ0uM

How to be a whale: a half-hour listening journey

https://www.tommustill.com/howtobeawhale

Project CETI

https://www.projectceti.org/

Earth Species Project

https://www.earthspecies.org/

Happy Whale

https://happywhale.com/home

Tom’s humpback

https://happywhale.com/individual/1437

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:

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This week, we're digging into how living creatures – including us – sense and respond to magnetic fields with quantum biologist Margaret Ahmad of the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

For decades, biologists knew about striking examples of species apparently navigating by Earth’s magnetic field, from monarch butterflies to loggerhead turtles to racing pigeons. Yet for years, many physicists said any ‘magnetosense’ was impossible, insisting the Earth’s field is far too weak to affect any biological processes within living cells. And yet, life really had found a way, and Margaret was one of the key researchers who showed how.

Back in the 1990s, she discovered a blue light receptor in plants, part of a mysterious family of proteins called cryptochromes, and she has since has pioneered research showing how these receptors don’t just sense light but magnetic fields, too. Through quantum physical effects, these proteins magnify impossibly weak magnetic signals into measurable biological responses in a cell.

For Margaret, this connection with the magnetic fields around us is a fundamental characteristic of all life, that should transform our thinking about everything from bird migration, to plant growth, to health effects in humans – and might even lead to revolutionary medical treatments. I spoke to her about her research, what it’s like doing science ‘out on a limb’, as she puts it, and what to do when the evidence leads you off the beaten track…

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University

https://www.ibps.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/ibps/directory/17216-Margaret-Ahmad

Hypersensitivity to man-made electromagnetic fields: 2024 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39108419/

2024 review on cryptochromes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38495372/

New Scientist story I wrote about Ahmad’s work in 2020 (£)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251835

2021 review on the bird magnetic compass

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.667000/full

Roswitha Wiltschko’s lab

https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/47093824/Physiology_and_Ecology_of_Behaviour

Some bacteria sense magnetic fields via magnetite crystals. It's possible these play a role in other species too, maybe even humans

https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019.abstract

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*** Edited highlights on YouTube

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada

https://www.yada-yada.net/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.