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 wellness lie within our own brains?

Journalist Erik Vance explores the unexpected ways our goals and beliefs impact our bodily replies to discomfort, disease, and everyday occasions. Drawing on decades of analysis and interviews with leading professionals in the field, Vance will take us on a remarkable experience about Suggestible You from Harvard’s study labs to a witch doctor’s office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative solution medicine school near Beijing (categorised as “China’s Hogwarts”). Vance’s firsthand dispatches changes how you think-and feel.

Continuing the success of National Geographic’s brain books and rounding out our pop science category, this book shows how expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and brains. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”-the very genuine chemical reactions our brains produce when we believe we are experiencing pain or recovery, actual or recognized. Supporting this idea is generations of placebo analysis in a range of forms, from sugars pills to surprise waves; research of alternative medication techniques heralded and condemned in different elements of the globe (believe crystals and chakras); and most lately, major advances in human brain mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we’re learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for customized medicine, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such research.

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