If you could swallow a pill, a blue pill may be your red one, and that pill would make you healthier, stronger, faster, smarter, happier.

Would you take it?

What if I told you there were no side effects, and that it was close to free?

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

People are afraid of the placebo effect. They don't like to talk about it. It makes their eyes roll into the back of their head.

There's some sort of fear that if you understood it or examined it or trafficked in it, it might go away.

So let's start by looking at the no-cebo effect instead.

The no-cebo effect recently studied is the idea that there are things you can do that make you worse.

One example, a guy was in a double-blind study of an antidepressant drug.

He wasn't taking the antidepressant. He was taking the sugar pills, the placebo, the drug that, quote, didn't do anything.

Well, he was depressed and he decided to kill himself, and he took 26 of them.

He was rushed to the hospital near death. He needed to be put on IV.

And it was only after several doctors informed him that he hadn't taken anything but a few spoonfuls of sugar that his condition stabilized.

No-cebos are all around us. Things we can do to bum us out, to make us perform worse, to make our heart race.

It begins with this. Most of your brain, perhaps 95% of your brain, doesn't speak English.

It speaks as much English as a monkey does or a beaver or a walrus.

That part of your brain, the brain that keeps you alive, the brain that pumps your blood, the brain that makes you afraid, it doesn't speak English.

Sometimes it gets a message from the rest of your brain, but here's the simple test.

Listen to some spooky violin music.

Now there's no other cues that this violin music is going to hurt you, but already you're just a little bit tensor and you were a minute ago.

Go watch a movie, an Italian movie, a French one, one in Swahili. You don't know the language. There are no subtitles.

And yet, and yet you've got a pretty good idea of what it's all about.

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