Sharper Minder & Body In 3 Weeks With 1 Supplement

We’ve written before about supplements that can boost cognitive performance and often physical performance too, for example:

• Bacopa Monnieri: Bacopa Monnieri: A Well-Evidenced Cognitive Enhancer
• Citicoline: Citicoline: Better Than Dietary Choline?
• Creatine: Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
• Lemon Balm: Lemon Balm For Stressful Times And More
• Lion’s Mane: What Does Lion’s Mane Mushroom Actually Do, Anyway?
• L-Theanine: L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?
• Phosphatidylserine: How To Rebuild Your Neurons’ Myelin Sheaths

And those are all great, but today we’ll be looking at something in quite a different category, insofar as it has only one mechanism of action (which should be enough for you to guess what it is):

The pill that’ll please

Researchers (Dr. Diletta Barbiani et al.) researchers tested whether a placebo—either deceptive or openly acknowledged—could improve cognitive, physical, and psychological function in older adults over 3 weeks.

Placebo (which word is Latin for “I will please”) is popularly misunderstood, and understandably so, as it was never conceived with this sort of purpose in mind. Its original purpose was to placate patients who wanted medical attention but for whom the doctor felt sure nothing was really wrong.

Nowadays, people think of the placebo effect as “imagining things”, but it’s not, it’s about the real measurable effect that placebo has on our body and its systems. Of course, placebo will work better for some things than others. It’s typically much better at reducing pain than it is at regrowing limbs, for example. But its effects can go far beyond the subjective—it can cause skin conditions to clear up, and cancers to shrink away. Not by magic, but because of how our own physiology adapted to deliver the expected result.

That said, it can fail too, so please don’t rely on placebo alone, especially if it’s something critical/existential!

Back to Dr. Barbiani’s study: 90 healthy adults aged 65–90 were randomized into three groups (no treatment, deceptive placebo, and open-label placebo) and completed both self-reports and objective tests before and after the intervention.

Those groups were necessary because of otherwise running into a similar problem to: How Does One Test Acupuncture Against Placebo Anyway?

In this case (Dr. Barbiani’s study), for clarity:

• Deceptive placebo = the participants taking this were told it did contain an active ingredient that will improve various metrics of their health
• Open-label placebo = the participants taking this were told that it was placebo, and/but that as such, it can still be beneficial to the health in various ways

And the results?

• Cognitive gains: memory and attention improved by 14.6% in the deceptive placebo group and 21.5% in the open-label placebo group
• Physical gains: physical performance increased by 7% in the deceptive placebo group and 9.2% in the open-label placebo group
• Stress reduction: the open-label placebo group showed a clear reduction in perceived stress compared with both other groups

You can read the paper in full, here: Placebo mechanisms in aging: A randomized controlled trial comparing deceptive and open-label placebos on psychological, cognitive, and physical functioning in older adults

Want to learn more?

For our own main feature on the placebo effect, see:

How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself

Enjoy!