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me/blinkistfree

Bionic Reading
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1/6

What’s in it for me? Discover the

power expectations have on
outcomes.

It feels like the idea of “mind over matter”

has a use in almost any scenario.
In sports, coaches preach the idea of
using “mental toughness” to push past our
body’s known physical limits.
In business, the saying, “if you can dream
it, you can do it,” has practically become the
go-to slogan for entrepreneurs and innovators
worldwide.
And in medicine, even just receiving a
diagnosis as being sick or healthy can make all
the difference in how our bodies actually feel.
Think about it – have you ever found yourself
reading a list of symptoms for an illness, only
to then begin feeling each of those very
symptoms shortly afterward? Even if they
weren’t there before?
But imagined or not, the concept of mind
over matter has always left one lingering
question: just how much can our mindset
directly influence our reality? And to what
extent do self-fulfilling prophecies actually end
up shaping our lives?
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David Robson, the author of The

Expectation Effect, has an answer: quite a lot.
And in this Blink, you'll discover the extent to
which your mind is a powerful prediction
machine, dedicated to making sure that your
reality matches up with your inner
expectations. From the aging process to the
effects of medication on your body, you’ll
uncover the power of the mind to change your
productivity, your health, and your future.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

 why age really is nothing but a number;

 the effects placebo drugs have on your
body; and
 why pointing a kangaroo bone at
someone could be fatal.

2/6

You have untapped reserves of

mental stamina.

When Barack Obama was president of

the United States, he wore almost exactly the
same suit every single day. The only thing that
varied was the color; the suits were either dark
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brown or navy blue. (Let’s forget about the tan

suit fiasco.) Obama isn’t alone in his limited
wardrobe choices, either. In fact, lots of highly
successful people, like Steve Jobs, Ariana
Huffington, and Mark Zuckerberg all prefer to
wear the exact same outfit every day. Why? It
all has to do with their expectations. But as
you’ll discover in this Blink, these expectations
are totally wrong.
The reason why Obama and Zuckerberg
dress the way they do is because they’re trying
to get rid of unnecessary decision-making. For
most of us, deciding what to wear each
morning requires conscious thought. Do these
pants match this shirt? Are these the best
shoes to wear with this jacket? According to
the theory known as ego depletion, we only
have a limited amount of mental resources to
use on decisions each day. After we’ve done a
certain amount of hard work, or decision-
making, or difficult thinking, those resources
are exhausted. With this in mind, these leaders
don’t want to waste their mental capacity on
thinking about exactly what to wear.
On the surface, the ego-depletion theory
seems to make sense. After all, how many
times have you come home from a hard day’s
work and felt too exhausted to do anything
except lie on the couch? Some experts have
even suggested that the reason why
successful people cheat on their partners is
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because they’ve used up all their mental

willpower on their career. They simply don’t
have the capacity to work on their
relationships.
But just how true is any of this? Because,
in fact, other evidence suggests that the ego-
depletion theory is instead just one big
expectation effect. The mental exhaustion we
feel after working hard is real, but it’s only real
because we expect it to be. At least, that’s
according to a study by Austrian psychologist
Veronika Job. Job asked participants to
complete two tasks in a row. Before they began
the first task, Job asked each participant
whether performing hard work usually a)
depletes their mental resources or b)
energizes them.
Interestingly, Job found that the people
who had listed hard work as exhausting did
much worse on the second task than they did
on the first. In contrast, those who listed hard
work as energizing performed evenly across
both tasks.
Now, this might seem like the predictable
outcome, but, in a follow-up study, Job then
tested whether it was possible to change
people’s beliefs and expectations about their
own mental depletion. So, for this next study,
before participants undertook the two tasks,
they each read one of two statements.
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One statement stated that hard work

depletes our mental resources, and the other
stated the opposite: that hard work has been
proven to energize our minds so much that it
actually enables us to thrive on other hard
tasks once we’ve started. Job found that the
people who had read the “energizing”
statement performed twice as well on their
second task as those who had read the
“depleting” statement. All because their
expectations had been shifted.
This just goes to show that our mental
capacity is much greater than many of us
believe. With the right expectations, we really
can get more done. So, the next time you find
your concentration waning in the middle of a
hard task, try and remind yourself of a time
when you found a challenging task energizing
rather than draining. Then ask yourself
whether that energizing task was objectively
harder than the task you’re undertaking right
now. Reframing how you view the challenging
task at hand will help give your mental stamina
enough of a boost to power through.
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3/6

Placebos are powerful drugs, with

many potential benefits.

Is it ever right for a doctor to lie to their

patients? In the nineteenth century, US
president Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so sure.
On the one hand, he knew that it was morally
ambiguous for a trusted doctor to deceive a
patient. But on the other hand, Jefferson
believed that placebos can do patients a world
of good. Two hundred years later, science is
beginning to understand that Jefferson might
have been right.
A placebo is a dummy medication that
contains no active ingredients. This means it
has no physiological benefits or
disadvantages for the person taking it.
Some of the first modern evidence of the
benefits of placebos was collected by a military
doctor during World War One. Henry Beecher
was an anesthetist whose job was to treat
Allied soldiers in France and Italy. These
soldiers had come straight from the battlefield,
and their wounds were often horrific and
deeply painful. Worse still, the pain-killing drug
morphine was in short supply, and Beecher
was sometimes faced with the awful prospect
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of operating on these men without any

anesthetic.
But during the course of his work,
Beecher realized something remarkable.
Oftentimes, a wounded soldier’s pain could be
effectively treated with a simple saline
solution. As long as the man believed that he
was being injected with morphine, he would
respond almost exactly as though he had been
given the real drug. In fact, Beecher estimated
that his placebo saline solution was about 90
percent as effective as morphine itself. It was
so effective that it reduced the chance of the
patient going into cardiac arrest while they
were being operated on, which was a major
risk during surgery without anesthesia.
Since Beecher’s pioneering discovery,
placebos have been shown over and over
again to have powerful effects. Consider recent
evidence from people with Parkinson's
disease. Many of its symptoms, such as
shaking limbs, are caused by a lack of
dopamine in the brain. With this in mind,
existing medications boost dopamine levels,
which provides relief. Remarkably, though,
when people with Parkinsons are given
placebo drugs, their symptoms can improve by
up to 30 percent.
How can we explain this? It may all come
down to the patient’s expectations. Experts
now believe that our brains act as the body’s
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internal pharmacy. When you expect to receive

a benefit from a medication, your brain opens
up its pharmacy, and releases biochemical
substances that affect your body much in the
way the real drug would. So in the case of the
Parkinson’s placebo, the patient’s brain may
have released more of its own dopamine or a
dopamine-like substance.
Evidence for the pharmacy theory comes
from a study that looked into placebo
painkillers. The researchers believed that
receiving a morphine placebo would stimulate
patients’ brains into creating their own natural
painkillers, known as opioids. To test this
theory, the patients were also given another
substance at the same time as the placebo.
This substance was called naloxone; it
effectively blocks opioid receptors in the brain.
The researchers found that the naloxone
stopped the placebo from working, just as they
would have expected if they had administered
it alongside actual morphine. This suggests
that the placebo morphine really was
stimulating the brain to produce its own
opioids.
Interestingly, though, not all placebos
have the same effect on us. Again, it comes
down to our expectations. Studies have found
that larger placebo pills produce a more
beneficial effect than smaller ones. Similarly,
placebos in the form of injections are then
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even more beneficial than pills. Finally, the

biggest placebo effect is seen after surgery. So
the greater expectations we have for the
procedure, be it in the form of pills or surgery,
the more placebo power we pump into
ourselves.
With all this in mind, let’s return to that
very first question that Thomas Jefferson
grappled with. Is it ever right for doctors to
deceive their patients? While we don’t have a
clear answer, one thing is for sure. When we
expect placebos to deliver powerful results,
they tend to do just that.
Having learned this, how can you now
apply this knowledge to your own health? First
off, when you start taking medication, try to
visualize the positive effects it could have on
your body. Doing so could help these positive
effects become a reality. Second, when you’re
prescribed a drug, take the time to ask your
physician exactly how it works to help your
body. Just knowing this information may help
in enhancing the effects of the drug. Finally,
your expectations will receive a boost if you
can talk to other patients who have used the
same medication and found it effective. Simply
knowing that it worked for other people may
enhance the chances that it will bring benefits
to you, too.
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4/6

In extreme cases, negative

expectations can kill you.

After discussing the positive effects

expectations can have on our minds, it’s only
fair to also lay out the risks of negative
expectations. Let’s start with the opposite of a
placebo. A nocebo. Placebo in Latin translates
as “I shall please,” whereas nocebo means “I
shall harm.” Just as our expectations can turn
saline solution into morphine, they can also
transform nocebos, harmless things, into
deadly weapons.
It may surprise you to learn that one of
the most ancient nocebos is a kangaroo bone.
According to traditional Aborigine culture, a
priest can use a kangaroo bone to put a deadly
curse on someone. This ritual is fairly
straightforward: the priest points the bone at
someone and chants a deadly curse. And,
within a few days, the cursed person’s body
will begin to weaken, until, eventually, they fall
down and die. According to nineteenth-century
settlers who witnessed this phenomenon, it
was as if the cursed person really did have a
deadly hex on them.
Of course, with what we now know about
the power of expectation on the body, it seems
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much less likely that these mysterious deaths

were due to the supernatural. Instead, a more
likely explanation could be that the kangaroo
bone and the priest’s words acted as a
powerful nocebo. Put another way, if you
believe strongly enough that something is
going to kill you, then you can actually bring
about your own death.
Not convinced? Then consider the
following infamous case of self-willed death.
Let’s travel back to Nashville, Tennessee, in
the 1970s. A man was diagnosed with terminal
esophageal cancer. This came as a shock,
especially since the cancer was so widespread
that his doctor doubted that he would live to
see next Christmas. Well, the man did live to
see Christmas, but he died just a few weeks
later, in January. Tragically, it seemed, the
cancer had won. But when an autopsy was
performed, the pathologist made a shocking
discovery. There was no tumor on his
esophagus. There was a tumor on his liver, but
it was small, and certainly not terminal. But
then, if that was the case, what caused the
man’s actual death? With his dire diagnosis in
mind, there was only one conclusion to be
drawn: it was the doctor’s prognosis that had
killed him. He had expected to die around
Christmas of that year, and so he did.
Our negative expectations can harm our
health in other ways, too. Often, the most
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potent nocebos come in the form of perceived

side effects to real medications. This means
that when we expect to suffer a side effect of a
drug, we are more likely to experience it. Take,
for example, a medication known as
finasteride, which is used to treat enlarged
prostates. An uncommon side effect of
finasteride is erectile dysfunction. One study
found that men taking finasteride were up to
three times more likely to suffer from erectile
dysfunction when they were explicitly warned
that it was a potential side effect. In other
words, many more men experienced a life-
changing symptom simply because they were
told about it.
Similar nocebo effects have been found
in the use of aspirin to treat angina. Patients
who were told that the aspirin might cause side
effects of indigestion and stomach discomfort
were six times more likely to stop the
treatment than people who hadn’t been told
about these side effects. And when asked their
reason for stopping the treatment? Nausea
and indigestion. This just goes to show that
our expectations can, quite literally, make us
sick.
If this news is starting to bring down your
own health, there are luckily ways you can
prevent harmful expectations from taking root.
First, when a medication does come with the
chance of an unpleasant side effect, try to
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reframe your thinking around your chances of

experiencing it. For example, if you learn that
one in ten patients suffers from a certain side
effect, keep reminding yourself that that means
that 90 percent of patients didn’t suffer from
this side effect. So the odds of your suffering
this are actually pretty low. Even just this
simple reframing of expectations could
prevent your body from needlessly developing
these side effects on its own.

5/6

Age is nothing but a number.

Paddy Jones loves to dance salsa. Not

just any salsa, but acrobatic salsa. This form of
the dance involves swinging through the air on
trapezes and requires perfect agility and poise.
Jones is good at acrobatic salsa, too. So good,
in fact, that she and her dance partner Nicko
have been featured in television talent shows
around the world, from the UK to Argentina.
But Jones’s incredible salsa moves aren’t the
only reason she’s become a dance sensation.
It also has something to do with the fact that
she’s 85 years old.
Ask Jones, and she’ll tell you that it
doesn’t feel hard to dance acrobatic salsa at 85.
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Why? Because she doesn’t feel like she’s in her

eighties at all. Inside, she feels like a much
younger person, and so she expects to
perform like a younger person, too.
And this makes sense. Evidence from
Harvard University researchers suggests that
how old we feel actually has a big influence on
our abilities, our health, and even our
appearance.
For example, in 1979, Harvard
psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a study
in which 70- to 80-year-old men and women
were invited to spend a weeklong vacation at a
secluded monastery. But this wasn’t just any
monastery.
Before the guests arrived, Langer’s team
had turned the clock back 20 years. They
decorated each room as if it were 1959, even
going so far as to lay out magazines and
newspapers from that exact year. They also
asked their guests to spend the week
discussing political and sporting events from
1959, as if they were taking place in the
present, rather than in the past. Finally, they
asked the guests to write a biography of their
lives for the year 1959, including everything
they had done during that year. Most
importantly, this biography had to be written in
the present tense. The goal was to make the
guests feel as if they were really living in 1959,
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not 1979, and as if they were 20 years younger

than their real age.
After the first set of guests returned
home, Langer’s team brought in another group
of 70 to 80 year olds. This group also spent a
week in the monastery, but when they
discussed events from 1959, they did so in the
past tense. This was meant to make them feel
as if 1959 was in fact 20 years ago, and that
they were still their true ages.
After both groups' stays were completed,
Langer’s team compared a series of health and
cognition tests taken before and after their
monastery experience.
The results were astonishing. After
spending a week imagining that they were 20
years younger, the first group performed
significantly better on the cognitive tests than
before their stay at the monastery. Not only
that, but their vision also improved, they had
better flexibility in their joints, and their levels
of arthritic inflammation also improved. To top
it all off, when independent observers, who
were not part of the study, saw photographs of
this group that were taken just after their
monastery vacation, they rated them as
looking significantly younger than the photos
of the same group taken only a week earlier!
Many of them said that this was due to their
posture; after the study, they appeared to walk
taller and more easily than before.
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On the other hand, the second group of

guests, who hadn’t been asked to imagine that
they were living in the past, saw almost none
of these improvements.
So, at the end of the day, maybe age
really is nothing more than a number.

6/6

Final summary

Your mind is a powerful tool in the fight

against illness, inaction, and even aging. By
visualizing positive outcomes for yourself, you
make it all the more likely that those outcomes
will become your reality. You might not be able
to think yourself into becoming healthy, or
young, but you can certainly create the right
mental conditions to help you flourish.
To implement this into your daily life,
here’s a quick piece of actionable advice to
take with you:
Find a way to channel high expectations
It’s hard to have a permanent positive mindset.
So, instead, try and find something tangible to
help steer your mindset. Like a lucky charm
that an athlete might use – something that you
can take with you on your daily routine. Even if
it’s just for a special occasion like a big
interview, if you can focus your expectation
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into this one lucky object, that might just
provide that positive bit of expectation that you
need to make a real difference. Because, as we
learned from the kangaroo bone, a little
superstition can go a long way if you believe it.