"One of the mysteries of tDCS is why some uses require a cognitive task and others don’t. The therapy makes people better at math only if it’s paired with a math task. But it seems to make depressed people feel better even if they’re just sitting there. Heidi Schambra, the neurologist who works with stroke patients, has a fascinating theory about this. She believes that, at the moment of receiving tDCS, a person in emotional or physical pain is engaged, wittingly or unwittingly, in a cognitive task: namely, the activation of the placebo response.
We’re not used to viewing placebo—a positive response to a sham treatment—as a “task,” but there are many cognitive factors involved, including Pavlovian conditioning, the patient-clinician relationship, and positive expectation. Deception, Schambra points out, may not be required: sugar pills have been shown to reduce the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, even in patients who were explicitly told that they were receiving a placebo.
The implication of placebo is extremely powerful: What if the body knows, in some sense, how to heal itself, and it’s just a matter of triggering that knowledge? Schambra suspects tDCS may not merely trigger the placebo effect, as all treatments do, but actually amplify it."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/electrified
I think the study of placebo is going to be on the big themes of biomedical research in the next decades, and I like this theory.
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