Re reference 1. Another example of this working in humans is that apparently school children become conditioned to the class interval bell to the extent that they receive a boost of adrenaline.
Is it possible to deliberately establish such responses in oneself? For example if i wish to become more alert on demand could I pair stimulant use with another experience? I could see useful applications to this.
We were talking about this at the last LA meetup in the context of place conditioning of drug reactions. Place conditioning occurs when you always take heroin (a drug that lowers your breathing rate) in the same place with the same people. You gradually develop a tolerance and take more and more heroin to get the same effects. Then one day you’re on vacation and you take heroin in a different place with different people, and die.
The theory is that every time you’re in your heroin spot with your heroin buddies (stimulus), your breath rate decreases and the nervous system has to raise the breath rate (response). Your nervous system gets pretty good at this, so even when you take large doses of heroin, you don’t stop breathing. But if you take a large dose of heroin somewhere else, then your nervous system doesn’t realize it has to raise the breath rate until too late, and the heroin decreases your breathing without any counter-efforts from the body and you die.
If you were to take a stimulant after playing a tone, your body would probably learn that your heart rate and various other metabolic parameters it likes to keep constant always go up after playing the tone, and as a result it would learn to lower heart rate etc. every time it hears the tone. When you play the tone without the stimulant, your body would lower metabolism and you wouldn’t receive anything to counter that effect, so you’d end up less energetic and not more.
Man, whoever told you about that must be well read ;-)
In all seriousness though, I would expect it to work for him, since the placebo effect seems to work for caffeine.
The “anti placebo effect” is the result of a simple classical conditioning. It looks like the strength is just some simple function of the relative timing of the CS and US. It ’s an attempt to maintain homeostasis so you don’t die.
The “regular placebo effect” is a different beast, and seems to have more or less full access to full cognitive capacity. The information about the contents of the pill gets fed ‘down’ to the “prior” input to your bayesian estimators. To the extent that the priors are strong and the data is weak, the final estimate sent back up can look a lot like the priors. This actually explains a ton of cool stuff, but that’s for another comment/post.
The vast majority of examples of this “anti placebo effect” that I have read about involve injections (there was one story of oral intake). I’m really speculating here, but I think that short time frame things like injections would call up the “anti placebo” more strongly than “regular placebo”. The first is that the other drug tolerance mechanisms can usually handle things when the onset is slow, but if the onset occurs in seconds, there has to be a quicker cognitive method to handle it. The second is that the signal to noise ratio is much higher with fast rise times which reduces the effect of the regular placebo effect, and increases the ease of learning the anti placebo effect.
Here are a couplesources on the classical conditioning effect on heroin tolerance.
Thats fascinating, I’d never thought about a reverse effect from conditioning, but retrospectively it seems an obvious adaptation.
Does this mean that the ‘regular placebo’ effect is purely psychological? In which case could it be triggered by things we associate with certain affects but don’t in fact have them? [Say if I sincerely believed lettuce had a strong stimulant effect]
Does this mean that the ‘regular placebo’ effect is purely psychological?
Umm, sure? What would a non purely psychological placebo look like? I’m not quite sure which distinction you’re making
In which case could it be triggered by things we associate with certain affects but don’t in fact have them? [Say if I sincerely believed lettuce had a strong stimulant effect]
Of course. Sugar pills aren’t really stimulants, depressants, anti-emetics, and everything else. Keep in mind that the effects come from the alief level, not the explicit belief level.
Re reference 1. Another example of this working in humans is that apparently school children become conditioned to the class interval bell to the extent that they receive a boost of adrenaline.
Is it possible to deliberately establish such responses in oneself? For example if i wish to become more alert on demand could I pair stimulant use with another experience? I could see useful applications to this.
You might get the opposite result you expected.
We were talking about this at the last LA meetup in the context of place conditioning of drug reactions. Place conditioning occurs when you always take heroin (a drug that lowers your breathing rate) in the same place with the same people. You gradually develop a tolerance and take more and more heroin to get the same effects. Then one day you’re on vacation and you take heroin in a different place with different people, and die.
The theory is that every time you’re in your heroin spot with your heroin buddies (stimulus), your breath rate decreases and the nervous system has to raise the breath rate (response). Your nervous system gets pretty good at this, so even when you take large doses of heroin, you don’t stop breathing. But if you take a large dose of heroin somewhere else, then your nervous system doesn’t realize it has to raise the breath rate until too late, and the heroin decreases your breathing without any counter-efforts from the body and you die.
If you were to take a stimulant after playing a tone, your body would probably learn that your heart rate and various other metabolic parameters it likes to keep constant always go up after playing the tone, and as a result it would learn to lower heart rate etc. every time it hears the tone. When you play the tone without the stimulant, your body would lower metabolism and you wouldn’t receive anything to counter that effect, so you’d end up less energetic and not more.
Man, whoever told you about that must be well read ;-)
In all seriousness though, I would expect it to work for him, since the placebo effect seems to work for caffeine.
The “anti placebo effect” is the result of a simple classical conditioning. It looks like the strength is just some simple function of the relative timing of the CS and US. It ’s an attempt to maintain homeostasis so you don’t die.
The “regular placebo effect” is a different beast, and seems to have more or less full access to full cognitive capacity. The information about the contents of the pill gets fed ‘down’ to the “prior” input to your bayesian estimators. To the extent that the priors are strong and the data is weak, the final estimate sent back up can look a lot like the priors. This actually explains a ton of cool stuff, but that’s for another comment/post.
The vast majority of examples of this “anti placebo effect” that I have read about involve injections (there was one story of oral intake). I’m really speculating here, but I think that short time frame things like injections would call up the “anti placebo” more strongly than “regular placebo”. The first is that the other drug tolerance mechanisms can usually handle things when the onset is slow, but if the onset occurs in seconds, there has to be a quicker cognitive method to handle it. The second is that the signal to noise ratio is much higher with fast rise times which reduces the effect of the regular placebo effect, and increases the ease of learning the anti placebo effect.
Here are a couple sources on the classical conditioning effect on heroin tolerance.
Sorry not to credit you; I remembered it was someone at the LA meetup but not exactly who.
Thats fascinating, I’d never thought about a reverse effect from conditioning, but retrospectively it seems an obvious adaptation.
Does this mean that the ‘regular placebo’ effect is purely psychological? In which case could it be triggered by things we associate with certain affects but don’t in fact have them? [Say if I sincerely believed lettuce had a strong stimulant effect]
Umm, sure? What would a non purely psychological placebo look like? I’m not quite sure which distinction you’re making
Of course. Sugar pills aren’t really stimulants, depressants, anti-emetics, and everything else. Keep in mind that the effects come from the alief level, not the explicit belief level.