David, thank you very much for joining me today. It's a pleasure. I've read your book,

and thanks for coming on for a chat. So, first of all, if I could get you to introduce yourself

to anyone that's listening that maybe hasn't heard of you before.

Okay, I'm David Robson. I'm the author of the Expectation Effect, and I'm also a science

journalist, and I write for people like the BBC and the Guardian. Okay, and how did you end up

writing a book? We'll get into what it's about, and the fact I ended up referencing it,

and one of my books, but yeah, tell me about how the hell did you get in this position to

stumble across this fascinating concept and end up becoming an author with a book about it?

Yeah, I mean, as a science journalist, like I kind of had covered the placebo effect a lot,

and as we know, that's when you expect a medical treatment to work it off, and

it's much better at relieving the symptoms, and you know, this can even be measured physiologically.

So, I've been, you know, fascinated by the mind-body connection for a while,

but then, like I kind of was writing a piece about the opposite of the placebo effect called

the Nossebo effect, which is where negative expectations cause bad outcomes. So, if you expect to

become sick, you often do start showing those symptoms. And weirdly, at the same time,

I was, I'd been kind of going through a bad period of my life, and I'd started taking these

antidepressant pills, and my doctor had warned me that a side effect of those pills would be

having these really bad headaches, and sure enough, I started experiencing these headaches,

and it was only through researching this article on the Nossebo effect that I realised that those

headaches were actually the product of my expectations. It really wasn't the chemical effect of those

pills. So, you know, once I kind of realised that, I opened my mind to the possibility that the

pain could go away, and it did, and it was, you know, really revelatory, because beforehand,

...