Arun The psychology teacher 1

16/08/2026

19/07/2026

Is placebo effect just an illusion or for real?

The placebo effect is a phenomenon where a patient's physical or mental health improves after receiving a fake or inactive treatment (like a sugar pill or saline injection). The placebo effect in pain reduction, or placebo analgesia, is a real neurological phenomenon where the expectation of pain relief triggers the brain to produce its own natural painkillers, such as endorphins and dopamine. This improvement occurs because the individual expects or believes the treatment will work. But its just half the story because belief alone cannot bring real changes in the body.

When one believes a treatment will help, their brain releases real chemicals that can genuinely reduce symptoms like pain, fatigue, and nausea. Based on principles of classical conditioning, brain triggers a conditioned response that prepares your body to heal. Functional MRI (fMRI) studies reveal that placebos physically reduce activity in pain-processing pathways in the brain.

But the placebo effect does not directly cure diseases like cancer, lower cholesterol, or eradicate infections. It just helps the body to manage symptoms more effectively.

18/07/2026

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

21/06/2026

The Heart's "Little Brain":

The heart contains its own intrinsic nervous system with roughly 40,000 neurons.
The main role of the nervous system in relation to the heart is to modulate and adjust its intrinsic rhythm.
The heart and nervous system stores emotional memories and physical responses(physical baselines established by past events). This allows us to unconsciously "remember" a feeling and react to it (like triggering a fight-or-flight response) before our conscious brain even registers a threat.
The heart's intrinsic nervous system and its role in storing emotional memory provide a direct, biological foundation for António Damásio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis.Damásio argued that decision-making is not a purely logical process; instead, it is heavily guided by physical sensations in the body, which he called "somatic markers."
Otherwise too, the heart and the brain do "talk" back and forth constantly through the vagus nerve.
A curious phenomenon called cellular memory is experienced by heart transplant recipients.
Many heart transplant recipients report adopting new food or music preferences, fears, and memories matching their donors.
A final scientific verdict is still out on this spooky phenomenon even though movies like blood work (2002), heart of a stranger ( 200), chambers ( 2019) have explored it.

11/06/2026

Counterfactual thinking - the advantages of thinking how a situation could have been much worse:

The lines from the song " mayakkama kalakkama " from 1962 Tamil movie Sumaithangi sung by PB Sreeenivas (composed by Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy, and written by Kannadasan) means there are crores of people who are less previliged and importance of seeking peace by thinking how one may be more privileged and lucky than those who suffer worse.

In a famous 1995 study by psychologists Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich, Olympic bronze medalists were found to be visibly happier than silver medalists. This occurs because silver medalists focus on "almost winning gold" (upward comparison), while bronze medalists are relieved simply to have got a medal instead of finishing fourth (downward comparison).

Counterfactual thinking is the human tendency to mentally simulate alternative outcomes and events that could have happened but didn't ( "what if" or "if only" thinking).

Downward counterfactual thinking is considered "better" than upward thinking primarily because it leads to relief and gratitude whereas upward counterfactual thinking leads to regret and frustration.

Its better not to think what could have happend and accept reality. But if one has to choose between upward and downward counterfactual thinking the latter is better of the two.

19/05/2026