Suggestible You Audiobook (Free)

This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains?

Journalist Erik Vance explores the amazing ways our expectations and beliefs impact our bodily replies to pain, disease, and everyday occasions. Drawing on generations of study and interviews with leading professionals in the field, Vance will take us on a remarkable adventure about Suggestible You from Harvard’s analysis labs to a witch doctor’s office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative medicine school near Beijing (often called “China’s Hogwarts”). Vance’s firsthand dispatches changes the way you think-and feel.

Carrying on the success of National Geographic’s mind books and rounding out our pop science category, this book shows how expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can easily actively change our anatomies and minds. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”-the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this notion is generations of placebo analysis in a variety of forms, from glucose pills to shock waves; research of alternative medicine methods heralded and condemned in various elements of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advancements in mind mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we’re learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for customized medication, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such study.

“An eye-opening exploration of the intersection between idea and research and a fascinating peek into our innermost selves.”-Kirkus Reviews