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Price and our sense of value add another dimension to the placebo question

I have a friend who once posted a perfectly good 23-inch Sony television on craigslist for free. Over the course of two days, four people committed to pick it up, only to cancel at the last minute. On the third day, he re-listed it for $50 and it was gone within the hour. Same television, higher price. What were people thinking? When faced with the same product at different prices, the less expensive is deemed to be inferior. The same thing happens with prescription drugs, and as MIT researchers found, it even works with pills that do nothing at all.

The scientists conducted a pain study with healthy volunteers. They were first presented with literature about a new painkiller, then split into groups. One of which was told the pill cost $2.50 and the other told it was discounted to ten cents. They were then subjected to two rounds of electric shocks, the first without the pill and the second after having taken the pill. Eighty-five percent of the $2.50 group reported a lessening of pain, while only 61 percent did in the bargain pill group. The kicker? Both pills were placebos.

The study certainly adds another dimension to the well-established placebo effect, which posits that factors beyond what we think a medicine does can have an effect on its actual benefits. Generic drugs are chemically identical to their name brand counterparts, yet the results of this study suggest there may be a threshold for cost, past which people believe the medicine is ineffective. It is a bit maddening to think that we’re susceptible to this kind of persuasion.

A new set of studies underscores the link between words and perception

If I told you my house were the only blue one on the block, you’d know how to find it. Whether it were powder or navy blue, our shared understanding of “blue” means we can communicate about color. Paul Kay, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to know exactly what that means to our brains. Are we thinking about the color blue or the word we use to represent it? Do the words we use influence the way we see the colors themselves? According to Kay, those two ideas may by inextricably connected inside our heads.

Kay recently co-authored two studies in which his teams conducted experiments to determine how our perception of color is influenced by language. In the first, the aim was to determine whether babies, not having yet developed language skills, used the left or right side of their brains to recognize color. It has been well proven that adults use the left hemisphere to process color; this is also the portion of the brain where most people handle language.

The researchers compared infants’ ability to react to changes in color on either side of their visual field to those of adults. The results suggested that color processing begins on the right side of the brain and is some how brought to the left through the development of language.

The second study involved subjects placed in an fMRI machine to measure which regions of the brain were activated to make judgments about particular colors. When easily named colors appeared (red, blue, green), the areas of subjects brains dedicated to word retrieval were shown to be more active than when they were shown more complicated colors (pinkish-purple, greenish-blue). Kay believes this is because our color perceptions are intimately tied to our language.

Last year, reporting in the New Yorker, John Colapinto took a visit to the Pirahã tribe in northwestern Brazil. He was following Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor who has studied the tribe for three decades. The Pirahã speak an remarkably strange language, unrelated to any other in existence. One of its more exceptional features is that it has no fixed words for colors. The Pirahã use descriptive phrases to convey color meaning:

“‘So if you show them a red cup, they’re likely to say, “This looks like blood,”‘ Everett said. ‘Or they could say, “This is like vrvcum”—a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.’”

Here is a case in which color and language are literally one and the same. For the Pirahã, the connection is taken to its logical extreme. We still don’t understand how the tie between the two ultimately comes to be, or how it affects our subjectivity, but the research continues to bring us closer to the answers.

Using just a length of fiber optic cable, scientists hope to recreate one of black holes’ most salient properties

Black holes are notoriously difficult to observe. They can’t be seen directly by a telescope because they absorb all light. We’re only able to tell they’re out there by the way they bend and heat the gasses around them. But we can, however, think up analogues which approximate some of the mechanics, which is what a team at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has done, using just a length of fiber optics.

The event horizon of a black hole is the line at which nothing can escape. Cross that line, and you will never come back. Since black holes were first described by general relativity in the early twentieth century, the thinking has maintained that all matter entering the event horizon added to the mass of the hole. Nothing went in the other direction. In the early 1970s, however, physicist Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to postulate the existence of a radiation emitting mass from the edge of these holes.

This so-called Hawking radiation has held up theoretically in the years since, but is impossible to observe in the physical universe. What the researchers at St. Andrews
are attempting to do is to observe the behavior of particles in their experiment with the hope that they behave as Hawking radiation would. In order to recreate the properties of an event horizon, the scientists are shooting two beams of light down a fiber optic cable. The second pulse has a wavelength longer than the first. As it mashes itself up behind the trailing edge of the first beam, the hope is to see particles shooting off as if that space were the event horizon of a black hole.

The researchers acknowledge the experiment is in its early stages and that the technique needs refinement in order to achieve the right effects, but the thinking at present is to use this experiment as a step closer to understanding one of the biggest mysteries in space.