Brain Sense

How your brain makes sense of your senses.

The Placebo Effect: How It Works

The placebo effect is not deception, fluke, experimenter bias, or statistical anomaly. It is, instead, a product of expectation. The human brain anticipates outcomes, and anticipation produces those outcomes. Read More

I follow the reasoning in

I follow the reasoning in this piece to a point, but the author loses me when she argues that all this expectation is a brain-effect. In other words, matter is the master of the mind rather than the other way around. Inert, unintelligent matter is causing us to think? Really?

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Faith Brynie, Ph.D, is a scientific and medical writer. She is the author of Brain Sense (Amacom, 2009).

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