You’ve no doubt heard of the placebo effect in medicine. But have you ever thought about its effects on your every day life, your business, your relationships? A great article from the New York Times’ Science Journal described its effects to “border on the miraculous”. Here’s how they explain it: “Much of human perception is based not on information flowing into the brain from the outside world but what the brain, based on previous experience, expects to happen next.”

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Thus knee-surgery patients who in fact did not receive any surgery at all, but thought they had, reported the same amount of relief as those who’d had the real operations; and as for antidepressant drugs, they are no more effective than placebos at all. Field expert Dr. Kirsch explains that placebos are about 60% as effective as most active medications.

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The placebo effect also works “in reverse”: when a group of people who were extremely allergic to poison ivy were rubbed with a completely harmless leaf, but were told they’d been in contact with the poison, all of them developed a rash in that very spot.

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What does this mean for you? In short, you will often see what you expect to see, feel what you expect to feel, and of course, you’ll usually be capable of exactly what you expect to be capable of. No more, no less… The decision of what to expect is up to you.