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Trusting the Experts
This post is a continuation of my “How the Mind Works” posts, all of which are listed at the end.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Richard Feynman
Do you trust the experts?
In Australia, a 600-km marathon is held every year between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne.
Back in the 1980s, a 61-year-old man named Cliff Young showed up to run in the race. All the world-class runners thought he was some homeless man who showed up in the wrong place.
Why?
Because Cliff arrived wearing overalls and galoshes. And he was obviously an old man. When he told them he was there for the marathon, the professional runners asked if he had ever run in a marathon before.
“No,” replied Cliff.
“How have you been training?” they asked.
“I have cattle on my station [farm]. I have no horses, so I run around to move them along.”
The runners laughed.
You see, every professional marathoner knew with certainty that it took about seven days to run this race, and that in order to compete, you would need to run 18 hours and sleep six hours. That’s what the experts all said.
Cliff Young was clearly not up to their standards.
When the marathon started, the pros left Cliff behind in his galoshes. (Later he would run with more appropriate shoes.) He had a leisurely shuffling style of running that targeted him as an amateur.
Cliff had no training. He did not know what the world-class runners knew.
You probably guessed that Cliff won the race, but that is not what is astonishing.
Cliff Young cut nearly two days off the record time.
How?
Because of his lack of training, he didn’t “know” that you had to sleep six hours.
Cliff got up three hours early and just kept on shuffling along in his galoshes while the pro runners slept. Cliff said he visualized rounding up sheep in a storm. He finished the race in just five days.
He beat everybody. He was a sensation in Australia.
Now world-class runners “know” it’s possible to run with much less sleep. They know that they can conserve energy by adopting an easy shuffling jog. Now they have adapted to a new way of approaching long marathons.
We are like the pro runners. We act, not always according to the “real truth” but according to some conventional truth given to us by well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning “experts.”
The experts have blind spots. And so do you.
The Nocebo Effect
You’ve heard of the Placebo Effect, right? That effect where doctors give a person a drug to help with an ailment, but what the doctors actually give is an inactive sugar pill?
And then the patient feels better as if the pill were the real thing.
Somehow the mind and body react to the suggestion of an authority.
People rarely hear about it, but there is also something called the Nocebo Effect, coined in the early 1960s. Doctors can suggest something negative and the mind and body responds.
In the 1970s, doctors diagnosed a man with end-stage liver cancer. They gave him a few months to live. He died and an autopsy revealed a tiny tumor that had not spread. The doctors’ planted the image of death, and apparently, the man died of that expectation.
In a 2007 study, a suicidal man took pills believing he was taking an overdose of antidepressants. He nearly died until the researchers gave him intravenous fluids and explained that he had been given placebos. The symptoms rapidly disappeared.
In a 2009 study, researchers gave placebos to patients who were told they were being given drugs with bad side effects. Participants experienced burning sensations, sleepiness, fatigue, vomiting, weakness, taste disturbances, tinnitus, and upper-respiratory tract infections. The nocebo complaints were not random but were specific to the type of drug they believed they were taking.
All of these examples point to one thing:
Self-fulfilling prophecies are real.
When other people give you negative pictures, or when you give them to yourself, the mind and body respond. They deliver the negative results you expect.
Beware of toxic people, toxic doctors, and toxic thinking.
_________
- Blind Spots and the Secret of the Reticular Activating System
- Changing Your Life Is Like Kitchen Remodeling
- The Subconscious Repository
- The Adaptive Unconscious
- Being an End-Result Thinker
Some days I feel like Bruce Willis in the movie The Sixth Sense. Except instead of seeing dead people, I see experts on TV lying to me. There were a lot of those days in 2020. I guess it the curse of being a very skeptical engineer.
The Left has thoroughly debased the concept of “expert” in the past year. Now I refuse to believe anyone presenting himself as any kind of expert.
Trust was in the title. Deception (lying) is the offspring of trust.
You probably mean you feel like Haley Joel Osment, who saw dead people. Bruce Willis was dead people.
But I agree about the “experts” and the lying. They don’t even try to hide it anymore.
Fascinating! One could have a field day just thinking about all the negatives that are introduced into our lives and how we buy in to them. The mind is such an incredibly powerful tool! It also says a lot about the information that we allow in, and those things we refuse to accept. Thanks, Mark.
You can imagine honest scientists giving up on Nocebo research given the ethical issues. Now imagine the unethical scientists and how far they would want to take such research, including massive propaganda in media and the schools.
I’ve been going after my own blind spots for over 40 years, in terms of my own habits and attitudes, self-image, view of reality, etc. as well as in politics, religion, scholarship…
You can likely imagine some of the isolation that comes with removing blind spots in myself that so many others retain.
Hence my ongoing efforts.
Very impressive! Identifying our blindspots can be so very difficult! On the one hand, learning about ourselves more deeply contributes to our mental health, to our relationships and to so many aspects of our lives. On the other hand, what we learn can also be alarming, disappointing and even debilitating, if we can’t decide what to do about them: do we identify our blindspots and in some ways accept them? Or do we acknowledge them and commit to working through them or overcoming them? Or once we are aware of them, is there no turning back to ignorance? It’s hard work. I would like to think I make this sort of effort myself, but not nearly in the depth that you do, Mark.
The difficulty is first in facing yourself and the root causes of things we don’t like in ourselves. For me, the greatest benefit has been experiencing that I am Soul with a body, emotions, and mind, not the other way around. (And it no longer makes sense for me to say I have a soul. No, I AM Soul. The continuing revelations from there are challenging but ever rewarding.)
Second, in facing how others have implanted triggering landmines in our minds without our knowing it. This is one way of defining a kind of black magic: Using the power of language, imagery, and strong emotions to implant negatives that control our perceptions and behavior.
Third, well… there’s so much. That’s why I wrote my series of A Lifetime of Learning books. They are all connected.