Suggestions can make cheap wine taste like Château Margaux, warp our perception of time, and alter our memories—and in an age where disinformation has impacted our personal lives and our politics, the power of suggestion is worth even more attention. In The Suggestible Brain, world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion Amir Raz, brings together cognitive aspects of psychology, sociology, and anthropology with issues in our contemporary culture and media, alongside a series of case studies of patients with disorders ranging from Tourette’s Syndrome to false pregnancies, lactose intolerance, and asthma, to show exactly how suggestions can cut deep into our brains, shake our fundamental knowledge, and override our core human values.
Merging Dr. Raz’s experiences as a magician and hypnotist with decades’ worth of his own neuropsychological research, The Suggestible Brain maps the twilight zone where magic and science coalesce, and shows how easily suggestible and manipulable we all are. Readers will walk away with actionable advice on how to harness the science of suggestion to propel change, protect against manipulative misinformation, and better regulate our internal, mental universe.
Dr. Amir Raz is a world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion with recent positions as Canada Research Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Psychology at McGill University, and as Founding Director of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. Formerly at Columbia University and Cornell Medical Center, his work has been covered widely in the media (e.g., The New York Times, Scientific American Mind), and he has written over 200 peer-reviewed articles (Nature, PNAS, Neuroimage, etc.) and won a Young Investigator Award and Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association. He is a speaker in high demand (e.g., his TEDx talk, “When can deception be good for you?”) and has been featured in documentaries (e.g., with the BBC, National Geographic, and the CBC). His new book is The Suggestible Brain: The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds.
Shermer and Raz discuss:
- Magic and suggestibility: why even skeptics think mentalism and close-up magic are different from stage magic (Banachek, Jamy Ian Swiss, Max Maven vs. Copperfield)
- Suggestibility, deception and self-deception: evolutionary adaptiveness
- Suggestibility and gullibility
- How to become less suggestible
- How rational an animal are humans?
- How suggestions effect brain measures (fMRI scans) = real experiences
- Phil Zimbardo & conformity, Stanley Milgram & obedience to authority
- Brain and mind
- Consciousness
- Altered states of consciousness
- Hypnosis
- Meditation
- Placebo and Nocebo: why they work even when people know they’re fake
- Witch crazes, social contagions, pluralistic ignorance, cults, political movements
- Anti-depressants and using suggestion to treat depression and anxiety, ADHD, Tourette’s
- Psychedelics as therapeutics
- Neuro-feedback and biofeedback
- Why do placebos work even when people know they are inactive pills—and why do red pills cause stress whereas blue pills feel calm?
- Fake news and what to do about it.
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This episode was released on December 14, 2024.
