Creative Tablet

Placebo can boost creativity

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

The placebo effect manifests itself in a variety of areas of health, medicine and even sports, allowing you to achieve better results in cycling and even in weightlifting. There is a well-known work that showed the ability of the "dummy", in which the experimental subjects believed, to improve their memory. In new experiments, scientists from the Israeli Weizmann Institute have demonstrated that placebo even increases creativity, as reported by an article published by the journal PLoS One (Rozenkrantz et al., Placebo can enhance creativity).

Lior Noy and Liron Rozenkrantz selected 90 healthy student volunteers and offered to smell a fragrant liquid with the smell of cinnamon. At the same time, half of the participants were informed that they were involved in testing a new intranasal drug that stimulates creativity. Finally, both were tested for creativity, found various ways to rearrange the squares on the screen, or came up with as many non-standard ways of using ordinary objects as possible.

In both tests, the group who thought they had received the latest remedy performed better than those who "just sniffed cinnamon." "The improvements are not so significant as to make you a new Picasso," says Lajor Noah, "but they were quite noticeable." Scientists believe that the point here is the greater confidence that the placebo gave the volunteers, allowing them to relax, reason and fantasize more freely.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru