
How much a person believes in the strength of a drug might influence how powerfully that drug influences brain activity, a new study has found. Smokers told to expect a low, medium or high dose of nicotine from an e-cigarette showed a brain response that tracked with the purported dose, even though nicotine levels were actually constant, researchers said. “We set out to investigate if human beliefs can modulate brain activities in a dose-dependent manner similar to what drugs do, and found a high level of precision in how beliefs can influence the human brain,” said senior researcher Xiaosi Gu. She’s an associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City. For the study, Gu and her team recruited a group of people hooked on nicotine and had them puff on an e-cigarette, after telling them how powerful a nicotine dose they should expect. The participants then underwent brain scans while performing a decision-making task known to engage parts of the brain affected by nicotine. “Beliefs can have a powerful influence on our behavior, yet their effects are considered imprecise and rarely examined by quantitative neuroscience methods,” Gu noted in a Mount Sinai news release. The thalamus — an important binding site for nicotine in the brain — showed a dose-dependent response to each person’s… read on > read on >