CXX: Placebo

How many things in your life are going well because you played a trick on yourself? Not intentionally, of course -- nor consciously, I'm sure -- but if you were to view specific aspects unique to your existence right now under the clear lens of hindsight and age, how many of these things are only positive due to a blind or unguided leap of faith on your part? A leap that you took thinking you had full control of distance, windspeed, height, and direction, when really you did not.

Enter the placebo effect: "the beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself." Translate this to outside a clinical study and it means that your belief in something affected you more than the thing itself. Perhaps you think that having a few beers will make you more sociable and extraverted when with a group of people, so you have a few beers and see that it really works. But if you (and everyone else) didn't hold this conviction, would beer have the same effect on you? Probably not.

The quotidian ramifications are unfathomable. It could mean that whatever is going on in your head takes far more precedence in the long run than what happens outside your body. Your interpretation of an event, when left unchecked, shapes you far more than the event itself.

If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, which would you choose?